For around eighty minutes Cardiff City defended as well as I’ve seen them do all season in tonight’s game against a Huddersfield side that were on an unbeaten run of fifteen matches going into the match, but, in the end, I’m afraid we showed why we’ve been a bottom third team all season and will probably finish that way as we wilted under an approach from the home team which was at odds with what Huddersfield are supposed to be all about under this manager.
On saying that, you have to credit Huddersfield, they found a way to win a game in which they trailed 1-0 in the eighty eighth minute and I was reminded of how away sides have wilted against better City teams than this one in the fairly recent past as we attacked the Canton End and the crosses kept on coming in.
In the end, I thought there was a degree of inevitability about the winning goal which duly arrived in the ninety fifth minute because we were the lesser side that cracked at the end this time – it’s progress of course because we’ve been all over the shop at the back from the start at times this season, but it’s frustrating that a performance that was so good defensively fell apart under a stream of crosses (apparently, Huddersfield put forty six of them in!) of a type which you would have thought we’d have been well equipped to cope with given the height we have in central defence.
This is even more true, because the crosses were not like the one which Isaak Davies produced which helped us to win the first match between the sides in November with the classic format of get by your man on the outside and cross from the byeline , they were delivered by someone (almost always Wales’ Sorba Thomas) coming inside and delivering his crosses from a position between twenty and forty yards from our goal.
The thing about Thomas is he is a good enough crosser to provide an element of danger to passes played in from areas where you’d think defenders want the ball to be crossed from , but as we became more frazzled as the minutes ticked down to the end, chinks which were not there most of the night started to appear and, although we came so close to what would have been a very creditable draw, we didn’t deserve anything from this game in my opinion because we’d handed over the initiative that we held for significant portions of the match to our opponents at a time when you could argue most of the hard work had been done.
A reason I thought we did so well defensively was that, apart from Tommy Doyle’s classy first goal for the club and a stabbed effort by sub Uche Ikpeazu that was blocked by home keeper Lee Nicholls, it was one way traffic towards our goal throughout the second half. Although Saturday’s match with Blackpool saw us having more than fifty per cent possession, that’s become a rarity again in recent weeks as we seem to have reverted to being almost happy to let the opposition have the ball.
As I’ve come to accept, low percentage possession figures don’t have to be a negative thing, I thought we were the better team tonight in the first half despite only having about thirty per cent of the ball and we definitely carried more of a goal threat than our high flying opponents. We were playing with a lot of discipline and a degree of intelligence which almost got us goals as Nicholls produced good saves to deny Mark McGuinness and Doyle, while Jordan Hugill drew another save from the keeper in the minutes before the interval.
All Huddersfield had to offer in reply was a shot well over the bar by ex City man Danny Ward and a Thomas cross from one of the rare occasions he got by Joel Bagan on the outside to deliver a low cross which Alex Smithies saved cleanly.
Right from the restart though, things were different – Huddersfield were forcing the issue and we’d lost the ability we’d had before the break to take the sting out of things with a phase of effective keep ball for the odd minute or so.
Strange then that our goal when it came was such a good one as Hugill cleverly flicked the ball into Doyle’s path and he beat a defender, then coolly placed his shot beyond Nicholls to get me thinking perhaps allowing Huddersfield so much possession and pressure after the restart was part of a deliberate plan whereby we were playing an extreme version of the counter attacking game?
I soon concluded it wasn’t. It was just us showing that, for all of the talk of a new method of playing under this manager, we are still poor at retaining possession- those little pockets when we had the ball long enough to start to frustrate Huddersfield disappeared and it takes a lot of very good defending, mixed with luck, for any side to hold on to a lead when the pressure is as great as it was on us.
Yet, for a stretch after scoring, it looked like City could do it, such was the quality of their defending. By the final whistle though, the natural order in football whereby so much pressure leads to goals had prevailed – harsh on City in some respects, but better, more rounded, sides would have been able to ease that pressure somewhat. Instead, we kept on presenting the home team with the ball and panic began to creep in where there had been order.
The frustrating thing is that the approach which finished us off should have been one we were glad to see because, in theory,it should have been easier to defend.
Iv’e seen suggestions that make it sound as if it was some sort of master stroke from the home side to hit right to left crosses from deep areas targeting the right side of our defence as if Perry Ng and Cody Drameh were midgets, but this is to ignore that the first goal came from a straightforward two on one situation which should not have happened when we were sitting so deep and the winner was down to Aden Flint missing a header you’d back him to make nine times out of ten because that is his game.
A long delay while Tom Lees received treatment for an injury inflicted by Hugill’s elbow (it looked accidental and so the yellow card shown to the striker seemed fair) only intensified the siege as it meant that there were still more than ten minutes for a winner to be scored once the equaliser had been scored with the clock showing less than two minutes of the ninety left.
It seems in the nature of things for the sort of team we are that as soon as your home form shows signs of improving, your away form goes out of the window – we’d kept our heads above water almost entirely through our away results from August through to December, but 2022 has seen us lose four out of five now on our travels in all competitions
Thankfully, however, the one we didn’t lose was the most important one, the 1-0 win at Barnsley when we started to put real distance between us and the bottom four and, as the games count down, one point from our last two games is not hurting us because, despite Reading having moved eight points clear of the relegation zone on the back of a couple of wins and Barnsley winning two out of three, the fifteen point margin between us and the bottom three is maintained – relegation really should not become a serious issue again now.
A personal whinge to finish on tonight and this season actually. I’ll start this by referring to one of the old videos of games from the late decades of the twentieth century I watch too much of on You Tube. This one featured Barnsley and was a match played at around this time of year in which the commentator said Mick McCarthy had already reached twenty disciplinary points for the season. No surprise there really, our former manager was the epitome of the “no nonsense” centre half, but it seems to me that he carried that philosophy into his managerial career because we’ve become a much dirtier and more ill disciplined side since he was in charge and the trend continues under Steve Morison.
We had a ridiculous seven players booked tonight by a referee that the on line commentator, rightly, said was letting a lot go in terms of physical challenges. It’s the first of the bookings which is most relevant to what I want to say because it captures most graphically the apparent philosophy we have this season of not letting an opponent go past you with the ball in any area of the pitch – if they are doing that, they have to be chopped down.
McGuinness had just had his early header saved that I mentioned earlier when Huddersfield began a break upfield which shouldn’t have offered much of a threat considering that they had been defending a Vaulks long thrown in, but McGuiness opted to hack down the man leading the break out, despite it being about seventy yards from our goal. Doyle I believe it was, was also booked for a cynical foul inside the Huddersfield half and yet it’s become the norm now to hear commentators say the player was “taking one for the team” or it was a “good foul” – to be frank, I think this is often bollocks.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m not looking for a return to Corinthian values, I accept that the so called professional foul is part of the game and has been for most of my lifetime, but McGuinness’ decision to chop down that Huddersfield player in a none too dangerous situation meant that he had to play almost a full game knowing that a slightly mistimed challenge or a relatively innocuous offence could see him red carded and this has to have an impact on how he goes about playing the rest of the game. There have to be situations where it makes more sense to let your opponent get past you depending on where you on the pitch and the likelihood of a counter attack coming to anything, but it seems to me that this season, and maybe for the second half of last season after McCarthy took over, the directive has been chop ‘em down wherever they are.