Fair play to Blackburn Rovers, I thought they were very impressive in beating Cardiff City 3-1 today to record their first away win of the season, but were they really that good or did City play a part in making them look one of the better sides I’ve seen come here in recent years?
As is nearly always the case with these sort of things, the answer is probably somewhere in the middle. Blackburn manager John Eustace said of their midweek loss to Stoke that took their run without a goal to four games that he’d seldom seen his side play better since taking on the job about nine months ago and the slick pass and move football which led to their first two goals today was superb, but my question is did they find it a lot easier to pass and move today than they do most weeks?
Self evidently, the answer is yes, if they were able to pick apart teams as expertly as they did us every week, Blackburn would be a lot closer to the top of the table than they are, but I do have to wonder why their season had started to fall apart after a very good start in the last month or so if they are capable of playing football like that.
Talking about pass and move football, it was a mixed bag from City today, the passing wasn’t too bad I suppose (certainly better than it usually has been in similar such home losses in the past four and a bit seasons), but, as for the move part, it was poor – to be absolutely precise it was very poor when it came to tracking runners, hence the number of times you saw Blackburn players running beyond the men who were supposed to be marking them.
In the last day or two, the feeling that the manager’s job was Omar Riza’s for the season at least, which I took to be the prevailing view in the Boardroom and among the fan base, seems to have cooled somewhat.
Clearly, Wednesday’s loss at Luton in a low quality affair where we created little has contributed to the change of mood somewhat, but the way Riza responded to the usual question about his future at yesterday’s pre game media meet up was somewhat flat as he talked about how his time at Cardiff should see him in good stead for any jobs he may apply for in the future. Furthermore, the release by the Trust yesterday of a summary of what happened at the club’s first Fan’s Parliament meeting held on 1 November showed that Mehmet Dalman’s answer to a question asking if there would be a quick decision as to the manager’s position was simply “no”.
So, it would appear that the powers that be at the club are not prepared to publicly confirm or deny whether Omer Riza has done enough to get him the job for the next six months or so.
I daresay that today’s second straight defeat for the team could well have led to the sort of Riza stay or go thread being started on messageboards anyway, but the more downbeat assessment that’s surfaced around the past day or so only makes such things more likely – indeed, it almost seemed like Riza was resigned to not being offered the job after the game..
For what it’s worth, I’m in the stay camp as far as Riza goes now. I certainly wasn’t after the Bristol City game and I would criticise him today mind for only making one substitution all game when his team was playing their third game in eight days. However, although we looked tired at times and there were those criticisms of our performance today I made earlier, various members of the squad have made it obvious that they are enjoying Riza’s management- Callum O’Dowda and Perry Ng have spoken in the past week about how they think the team has improved under Riza.
The contrast in performance levels immediately before and after Errol Bulut’s sacking makes it very hard to draw any other conclusion than the team far prefer playing for Riza than they did Bulut and although I’m not one to favour the sort of player power that can get a manager sacked, I have, having watched more than a year of Bulutball, more than a degree of sympathy for any player who was pleased to see the end of Bulut’s time in charge.
I believe the Board should consider what some players have had to say about our interim manager recently, because it seems to me that they should not risk a return to performances like Derby and Leeds by ditching Riza and returning to a shortlist of applicants that a few weeks ago they were writing off as too boring.
Having said that, the situation has changed to the extent that the highly respected Mark Robins is out of a job now after what, from a distance, seems his bonkers sacking at Coventry, while I’d go as far as to rate it likely that Luton manager Rob Edwards will be sacked in the next few days following their 5-1 loss at Middlesbrough yesterday.
Having watched Luton in action only four days ago, I’ve seen more than enough of that type of football from City in the last decade and would not want Edwards to be considered for the job. Robins is different though – my original preference was Tony Mowbray and I’d say there are definite similarities between him and the former Coventry boss, so it follows that I’d have to be in favour of any move for him. Furthermore, the word from Coventry fans is that Robins did not want to work with a Director of Football and so i would have thought that would be a tick in the column as far as Vincent Tan is concerned.
However, mention of our owner leads me on to what I believe the situation is as far as the Cardiff manager’s job is concerned – I have no definite evidence for this, but my strong belief is that managers widely perceived to be good at their job would be reluctant to work for someone who has a reputation like Vincent Tan’s.
I’d add that Robins is 54 now, not ancient by any means and I wouldn’t be surprised at all if he isn’t finished with management yet, but, after seven years in the Coventry job, he may well feel he needs a break for a while to recharge his batteries.
Moving on to the game, I don’t think there was any lack of effort by the players today, but they looked tired and yet a Blackburn team on a run of poor results that had the same amount of recovery time as us from Wednesday didn’t.
Alex Robertson was not at his best today (no one turned in a performance that matched what we saw from them in those wins against Plymouth and Portsmouth), but he’s definitely improved the mobility of our midfield, yet you look at the other players we have in that area of the pitch and it looks pretty bleak as far as the move bit in pass and move goes.
City looked to be starting to take control for a while today, but our recovery against Norwich only really began when Callum Robinson came on. Today, Robinson was missing again with what Omer Riza called a chronic Achilles issue and, once again, we went with Colwill and Chris Willock as a pair of false number nines – it didn’t really work a week ago and although I thought the latter was one of our better players, it didn’t work here.
The fact that Riza left Yakou Meite and Wilfried Kanga on the bench speaks volumes. Meite did come on for the again anonymous Anwar El Ghazi at half time and, as at Luton, had a go and gave us more physicality, but you only have to look at his goal scoring record to see that when we have Robinson unavailable, we don’t have a single Championship quality striker we can field at the moment. That’s not Riza’s fault and although Kion Etete should be fit again soon, you can’t expect much from someone who’s been out for so long, so we’re going to be praying that Robinson’s Achilles doesn’t start playing up until January at least (as an aside, Roko Simic is barely getting a kick at Kortrijk and is often left out of their squad completely, so he doesn’t appear to be an answer to our striker problems at this point in his career)..
Just to quickly mention the goals, I’ve heard that Blackburn played forty three consecutive passes to present Andreas Weimann with a tap in for their first one. The same player was left with an easier finish early in the second half as an incisive pass of a kind that City could never find played left back Harry Pickering into acres of space with Perry Ng and Ollie Tanner nowhere to be seen and the resultant cross and finish was simplicity itself.
City built up some momentum after that and they finished the game with twenty goal attempts and yet no player in blue could be berated for missing a good scoring chance because there weren’t any.
I should mention now that I could go on for ages about how poor referee Gavin Ward was, but he wasn’t the reason we lost, so I’ll restrict myself to saying that, although it was a definite penalty, I was amazed when he penalised Blackburn sub Joe Rankin-Costello for jumping into album O’Dowda as they contested a cross because it was the only thing he gave us all day.
David Turnbull took the penalty and now had his first City goal in a competitive game to his name, but he needed two goes at it as goalkeeper Ainsley Pears blocked what was a prett poor spot kick only for Turnbull to knock in the rebound.
City forced a succession of corners, but never looked like making anything of them primarily because the delivery wasn’t good enough and the visitors sealed the points when sub Lewis Baker was again left free out on the left to place a shot across Jak Alnwick and into the net with me wondering if our captain could have done better with it*.
We now have the third and final international break of the autumn before City play again. A week ago it would have seemed daft to question whether Omer Riza would still be in charge when fixtures resume, now it looks less so. Whether there’s a change or not, I’d like to record my thanks to Riza for at least reminding City fans for a while that football can be both entertaining and effective and I would hope that, if we do look elsewhere, the new manager is told that Riza has to be given the chance to stay on and continue to work on the attacking side of the game.
The under 18s were unable to cheer things up as they went down to a 2-0 loss at Bristol City, but, these days, there’s always the Under 21s to do that and last night they came back from 2-0 down with less than twenty minutes left to draw 2-2 at Everton thus just about maintaining their place at the top of their League Cup qualifying group. There is some doubt as to who scored the first goal, but it looked like Morgan Wigley to me on the highlights shown on the club website and it was definitely Trey George who scored the late equaliser.
*Having now had a night to sleep on it, I’m still not convinced either way, although I do feel that Alnwick will think he should have done better with it.