Burnley 5 - 0 Cardiff. Comment

Team A has forty nine per cent possession, team B has fifty one percent of the ball, team A has nine goal attempts, team B eleven, both of them end up with four efforts on target, team B has eighteen touches in the opposition penalty area to ream A’s nine and Team B wins the corner count five to two – what would you predict the outcome of the match to be?

My answer would be a draw, probably 1-1, with team B possibly edging a win by a single goal margin, but I’d be spectacularly wrong, because team A was Burnley and team B Cardiff in this afternoon’s match at Turf Moor which ended in a 5-0 win for the home side!

That’s a freakish outcome and, to a degree, it was a freakish result. Scott Parker, who I really liked and rated as a player, has two promotions from the Championship to his name as a manager and he could well get a third one this season, but he’s not revered at Fulham or Bournemouth for taking them to promotion and I can understand why – Parkerball always strikes me as efficient and bland with little to get you out of your seat as his teams get the job done without showing the full extent of their collective ability.

For 90 minutes, today’s game was typical Parker fare, his team honestly weren’t great in building up a 3-0 lead which had more to do with the extreme generosity of their opponents than anything spectacular on their part. However, two great shots from distance in added time did add that spectacular element and six points from two games with a goal difference of 9-1 means Parker and his team have hit the ground running.

I accept this will sound mad if you did not watch the game, but City were, by some way, the better side in the first half. Actually, maybe I should qualify that to we were better than them in the middle third, but a propensity towards sometimes chaotic individual errors ensured that this was never going to be reflected in the score line which saw us two down against opponents that had just one on target effort in the opening forty five minutes.

City had made a decent, untroubled start to proceedings when Dimi Goutas rolled a back pass to Ethan Horvarth on nine minutes. Having now seen it plenty of times from all sorts of angles, the pass was maybe very slightly overhit, but that was the only slight thing which may have inconvenienced the keeper.  The ball certainly didn’t bobble on its way to him, but Horvarth, under no real pressure from Burnley forwards, got his foot into a strange position to my mind and the ball rolled under his foot, then trundled over the line with the keeper scrambling it out before it hit the back of the net. There was no doubt though that it was a goal though and the only surprise for me was to see the farcical goal recorded as an og against Horvarth and not Goutas. Sadly, it was a goal that felt like it had been coming for months as Hovarth has never been that convincing with the ball at his feet. 

I’ve said once or twice that we’re going to concede the odd soft goal in the coming weeks through playing out from the back, but this wasn’t one of them, this was a big standard back pass to the keeper of the kind we’re too keen on playing as a matter of course.

City responded by taking charge of the midfield with the veterans Siopis, Ramsey and Ralls combining effectively. Within a few minutes, Ramsey had sent Yakou Meite clear in a one on one against the keeper. Around half an hour later, Burnley captain Josh Brownhill found himself in a similar position and you just knew he was going to make it 3-0, just as you knew that Meite would not make it 1-1 because City first team players do not score from positions like that. Meite’s shot crashed against the post and out as the lack of a natural finisher on the club’s books was keenly felt yet again.

There are hopes that Wilfried Kanga can prove to be that instinctive finisher we’ve lacked since Sory Kaba’s loan spell and he put a simple finish away with the minimum of fuss when keeper Hladky pushed a Callum Chambers header out into his path. Kanga was clearly offside though and the goal was rightly disallowed. 

There was a much more marginal offside given against Kanga when an impressive first time pass by Chambers found him unmarked on the edge of the penalty area, but the Ivory Coast international’s response to a glorious pass by Ralls that put him in on goal was disappointing as he seemed to lack the confidence to drive forward with the ball as he allowed home defenders to catch up with him and then crowd him out.

It felt like a goal was coming though, but when it did, on thirty one minutes, it was down to another Cardiff defensive implosion.

I didn’t hold Goutas at all responsible for the first goal and, to be fair, he was left somewhat isolated out on our left flank here, but, to allow himself to be completely skinned by Jay Rodriguez was shockingly bad. Rodriguez has had a very good career and has been capped by England, but he’s thirty five now and I bet he must have felt like all his Christmas’ had come at once as Goutas launched himself into a lunging tackle from yards away that never got remotely close to the forward – I very much doubt that another Championship centre back will put themselves in such a position against Rodriguez all season. Rodriguez continued into the box and rolled back a cross that was half cleared into the path of Luka Koleosho who scored from ten yards out.

Within minutes, Ralls, who had been showing us the type of creative player he could have been if he hadn’t been turned into a ‘bread and butter” midfielder by Neil Warnock, was forced to hobble off with an injury and was replaced by Rubin Colwill. The half ended with a feeling that City were in the process of losing the superiority they’d enjoyed and the fact could not be denied that, for all of their impressive passing, they had been a lot worse than their opponents in both penalty boxes.

The start of the second half contained little to suggest City were going to stage a dramatic fight back, but they were then effectively blown away when Burnley dispossessed O’Dowda inside their own half and a quick exchange of passes left Brownhill free to run thirty yards through a yawning chasm in the visiting defence before slotting the ball past Horvarth to make it 3-0.

City had now lost their attacking threat and with Burnley, seemingly, happy to see the game out, there was a lack of drama in the next forty minutes or so during which Malachi Fagan-Walcott was brought on for Chambers to make a league debut in which he did nothing wrong.

Sadly, added time saw Aaron Ramsey prove that no one can wind back the clock, especially when you’re a footballer who has had more than his fair share of serious injuries.

The miscontrolling of a simple ball when Ramsey was in acres of space was unusual in such a talented player, but it was born from tiredness as was the way he was then easily brushed off the ball, but Zeki Amdouni’s thunderbolt a few seconds later from thirty yards that bounced down off the crossbar and over the line (it didn’t look like it crossed the line to me, but you can’t argue with a decision like that now in these days of goal line technology can you) was a very harsh punishment for the midfielder.

Within a few minutes, Ramsey was robbed of possession again deep inside the home side’s half and they again broke quickly for veteran Johann Berg Gudmundsson to drill a low shot from twenty five yards beyond the hapless Horvarth to complete the scoring.

So, City find themselves at the bottom of the table having scored none and conceded seven with the away South Wales derby, for which we seldom show up, and a home game with fancied Middlesbrough to come.

Unsurprisingly, Erol Bulut finds himself under pressure tonight, but, in truth, I agree up to a point with his post match comments – you’d never believe it looking at the score line, but I thought there were some promising signs from City today.

I’ve stated that I’m giving Erol Bulut a clean slate this season and, as someone who believes you should never sack a manager two games into a campaign, I’m not going to join the calls for his dismissal now, but, as someone who had serious doubts about the decision to give Bulut a new contract in the first place, I’d like to make a few observations about today and things in general at the club.

1. Bulut’s selection was the usual same old, same old today. City’s crop of promising youngsters were either ignored and omitted from the squad or, like the fit again Cian Ashford, left unused on the bench, just like he was for most of the second half of last season. What we saw from the youngsters in Tuesday’s cup tie may as well not have happened as Bulut followed the precedent of last season of treating non league games as an irrelevance when it came to selection for Championship fixtures – it was so telling that the youngest players in today’s starting lineup (Kanga and Chris Willock – who I thought was our best player) were 26 years of age!
2. That said, the Siopis,’ Ralls and Ramsey triumvirate showed that it does have a part to play as, for half an hour or so, they worked very well together . However, Ralls going off injured and Ramsey’s nightmare last few minutes offered a reminder, which shouldn’t really have been required, that it needs to be managed properly and you would have thought that the lesson that you shouldn’t play Ramsey for the whole game would have been learned last season. As soon as we were three down, Bulut should have been looking to take Ramsey off, but, for some reason, he seems determined to keep him on for the full ninety this season when he is selected.
3. Alex Robertson, the midfielder so many fans were desperate to see us sign because he would give us some much needed legs in midfield was an unused sub today, what’s that all about? Also,  it’s hard to see the logic behind freezing Ryan Wintle out of the first team picture and the continuing selection on the bench in front of someone like Eli King of Andy Rinomhota, who was being loaned out to Rotherham last season.
4. We’ve now conceded sixteen goals in our last four league games and our best defender, who played and scored in the week, was not even in the squad today. Mark McGuinness was also missing for all but the last few minutes of one of those four matches. The reason McGuinness wasn’t there today? It seems he’s on the verge of being sold – fans of other clubs would look at that and think it was madness!
5. On the subject of defending, Goutas was a good defender for us for much of last season, but his form suffered towards the end of it and, although I’m still not sure who it was who lost his man for the initial header with Sunderland’s first goal, Goutas was clearly not marking anyone when the cross came in – there were plenty of players who appeared culpable with that goal and Goutas was certainly one of them. Now, he has the second goal today to be chalked up against him as well.
6. Ethan Horvarth had a nightmare today. Some were blaming him for the first three goals, but I don’t think he can be faulted for any of the five apart from the first one – that was all his own work though and it has to be right up with the worst goals of its type I’ve ever seen. I think it’s fair to say that many City fans are from convinced that our best goalkeeper is playing every week and, after what happened today, I’ve joined them.
7. Despite what I say in points five and six, above, I’m pretty confident that both Horvarth and Goutas will be there in the starting eleven next Sunday at Swansea because some seem undroppable in league games under this manager, while others, Rubin Colwill for example, are never picked in the starting eleven no matter what they do in preceding matches.
8. I’m struggling to see signs of Erol Bulut’s management of the club developing in a way which suggests he is learning about the Championship. I like the fact that he is trying to implement a new style, but in so many ways, Bulut’s management has regressed since November and he appears to have lost the knack of producing well organised, tactically astute defensive sides that formed the basis of his reputation, such as it was, when we appointed him.
9. I found the degree of support during the summer for Bulut on social media sites like Twitter mystifying, just as I found the chanting of “we want you to stay” at some of the closing games of last season truly baffling. Yes, he took us into mid table which I accept was something of an achievement, but the level of general performance and many of the end of season stats were suggestive of us being in a false position – once again, the word freakish seems appropriate when describing our top half finish.
10. Despite this, we can’t really be looking at a situation whereby we’re going to sack another manager who we not long ago gave a new contract to so early in the new season can we? Although I wouldn’t be wholly disappointed to see it happen, I can’t help thinking that financially it would be a bonkers decision by the City Board to sack Bulut, but that hasn’t stopped them in the past has it!

Finally, after the under 21s disappointing 1-0 home defeat by Sheffield Wednesday in their first game of the season last Wednesday, the under 18s made it two wins from two at lunchtime today with a 2-0 triumph over Birmingham at Leckwith – Osian Rees and Lennon Talbot scored either side of half time to secure the victory.

Oh, let’s not forget the two cricket games taking place this Sunday, best of luck to Glamorgan in their One Day Cup Semi Final with Warwickshire and to the Welsh Fire women’s team in their Hundred Final against London Spirit.