If I was a paranoid type, I’d be accusing the decision makers at Cardiff City tonight of having read the piece I did this morning talking as if the appointment of Vitor Campelos as our new manager was a done deal and decided that they’d embarrass me by naming someone else as the man in charge some five hours later!
In fact, I would not only be paranoid, but I’d also have a heavily inflated view of my own importance. However, although I didn’t exactly cover myself in glory this morning, I did get one thing right – I said not many, if any, City fans would have known of the existence of Vitor Campelos before Thursday and I think the same is true of our new manager. Furthermore, I don’t think they would have heard of him until this lunchtime when the BBC and Wales Online websites carried stories about the appointment followed about an hour later by a confirmation on the club website.
There’s a Tweet posted today by the journalist who operates under the name Roath Boy saying that he’d spoken to Chairman Mehmet Dalman who’d told him that the club’s number one target had been offered a job by a Bundesliga club and that he guaranteed that Roath Boy would not have heard of him.
I said that there may be a few real nerds among the City fanbase that had heard of Vitor Campelos and I reckon that applies moreso to Erol Bulut who is our new manager having turned down that Bundesliga club for us it seems.
I’m definitely not among those who will have heard about Bulut beforehand, so I’m like many others who are going to his rather brief Wikipedia page to get some information about him, but you only have to look at one of the clubs he has managed to feel that his name may be better known to some supporters of the club than Campelos’ was.
There’s not much more I can add about our new manager besides what appears on his Wikipedia page, but I can’t say I’m too enamoured with what I’ve read about him from people who claim to know how Bulut’s teams play. Apparently, at his last club, the average age of the team was nearly thirty, he favours a high pressing game, is prepared to let the opposition have most of the ball and specializes in low scoring and pretty dull games (he is reported to have said that the opposition had all of the ball, but we ended up with the points after a game). Some of that reads like Neil Warnock, but does Bulut have the man management skills that help make Warnock a success at this level in the short term at least?
Given that most of this inside track information came from Twitter, I’m sure there are many who will feel that I’m placing too much store in something they wouldn’t give the time of day too. In truth though, I’m not paying too much attention to what is being said about Bulut on social media – he deserves to be analysed tactically with an open mind when we start playing our warm up and early season games.
The truth is that, as a Cardiff fan, I’ve become very good at recognizing teams that prefer not to have the ball and feed off opposition mistakes while playing a type of game that is not easy on the eye – if Bulut sends out his side to play that way, I’ll know soon enough that all that is being offered is more of the same, mostly unsuccessful, fare that we’ve been watching for most of the past ten years and more.
. To counteract the last three paragraphs to some extent, I could make a guess that, based on his pretty extensive experience of Futsal, Erol Bulut is someone who places a lot of store on the technical side of the game, but there’s no guarantee that I’d be right in thinking that, so, as I say, it’s probably best to just wait and see.
Moving on, you would think that having managed a club as big as Fenerbache and having, apparently, turned down a job in the Bundesliga to come here, Bulut is going to be on fair whack at Cardiff.
Despite a general acceptance among supporters that we’re skint this summer, the club are presenting Bulut as being a step up in class from recent City managers – it’s being reported that “the boat was pushed out” by the club opting for Bulut (incidentally it’s been reported that the other names on City’s four man shortlist for the job were Nathan Jones and Oscar Garcia who I spoke about in this morning’s piece plus our former player and son of John, Cameron Toshack who was a well regarded Academy coach at Swansea and worked as an assistant to Jesse Marsch at Leeds).
Vincent Tan has talked about how he thinks that having a manager like Bulut at Cardiff will mean that better players will be more willing to sign for us because of the manager’s reputation.
Just what has Bulut done to earn the sort of reputation City clearly think he has though? I suppose his greatest single achievement has been taking his second club Alanyaspor to their first ever Turkish Cup Final, but, despite not lasting a full season at Fenerbache, that club were having their best season in seven years under his management and he had a decent record at Gaziantep, his last club, despite their financial problems and the effects of the serious earthquake that hit Turkey earlier this year.
I used the word “intriguing” to describe the reported Campelos appointment and I think the same applies to Erol Bulut who will be giving his first press conference on Monday. However, even if he really is an improvement on what we’ve had lately it seems to me that he’ll have to do a couple of things if we are not to go through a repeat of what we saw in the season just ended.
First, Bulut will need to get more out of the club’s younger players than we saw in 22/23 and, secondly, he will quickly need to identify the areas where we need improvement and put the theory that he can attract better players to the club to the test straight away.
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