Will Vaulks, who is a good and interesting interviewee whose opinions are always worth a listen, got a lot of positive feedback a week ago after the Preston win with his defence of Cardiff City’s method of playing. According to our midfield man, not every team has to build from the back and there’s nothing wrong with getting the ball forward quickly – we are, according to Vaulks, “horrible to play against”.
This was a line endorsed by Mick McCarthy later in the week and I’m sure that, if they were being honest, most teams we play would admit this is the case, so the “horrible to play against” line is, probably, officially true.
However, as the whistle blew to the signal the end of our six game winning run today with a 1-1 draw at Middlesbrough, a variation on that theme came into my mind – today, we were horrible to watch.
Now, it’s only fair to qualify that in a few respects. Firstly, and most obviously, there’s the aforementioned six game winning run, and eight match unbeaten run, during which we have played our best football of the season and attacked, and defended, with quality at times to consider – any criticism of today’s performance has to come against that context.
Second, rather like Neil Harris during our four game winning pre Christmas run, Mick McCarthy has stuck with the same starting line up game in game out – today was the fifth successive match we had begun with the same starting eleven.
Thirdly, and this particularly applies to the second point above, what looked like an outstanding physical effort to win a crucial game at Bournemouth on Wednesday was proved to be exactly that today. It felt like one game too many for too many of our team today, there was none of the spark or confidence you’d expect from a team that were on such a fantastic run – we were also up against opponents who had a day longer to recover from their midweek match.
So, what I’m going to say now comes against that background and I want to re-emphasise that we’ve been so good since the change of manager – we’ve scored some great goals, we’ve scored goals at a greater rate and conceded them at a lesser rate, so I don’t want to be critical just for the sake of it.
However, that performance under Neil Harris would have been widely panned by media and fans alike and with good reason. For me, a major factor in our improvement has been that we’ve been able to bring our matchwinners into the game more – today that just didn’t happen.
For myself, I’m sorry for getting on my hobby horse again, but I’ve got to talk about our passing, or, to be more accurate, about the lack of it.
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The last week has seen a reaction from some in the club against the supporters and pundits who have been critical of our style of play (Neil Warnock also joined in) and they had a point in many respects because, as mentioned earlier, there has been a lot that is good in our play over the past few weeks. What I don’t get though, and have never done, is why it should be that playing in the manner that we have done under Russell Slade, Neil Warnock, Neil Harris and now Mick McCarthy should somehow mean that we have to pass the ball as poorly as we so often do?
Under Neil Warnock, I used to write about periods of up to twenty minutes when I would struggle to recall a single pass that was completed in a manner which did not put the receiver under unnecessary pressure – that sounds ridiculous I know from professional footballers, especially when we’re talking about a team that got promoted to the Premier League, but nevertheless I’d be at games where this would happen.
Although it doesn’t strike me as being the case, the fact that I’d not had that feeling for a while, may suggest that we’ve improved on this front – or maybe I’ve just got used to it?
Today though, it was back again, we went for a long stretch of the game in the first half without playing an accurate, measured pass that reached its intended target. Actually, that’s not true, there were two, both from Vaulks in the form of under hit back passes to Dillon Phillips that were just about dealt with as Boro attackers closed in as they sniffed a gift goal, so we did manage two passes, both of which happened within a period of about five minutes when Vaulks was also booked.
With Marlon Pack anonymous and Vaulks having his poorest game for some time, this was a day when the limitations of playing with just two central midfielders were shown. Pack and Vaulks had done well in recent games, but their cause wasn’t helped by our three centre backs looking what they are today, a trio of defenders who are not that comfortable with the ball at their feet when asked to play passes from the back – it seems we can have one or the other at Cardiff, defenders who are good at stopping the opposition scoring or defenders that can pass the ball better than our current crop can, but not both .
Things weren’t helped either by the relative lack of movement in front of the central defenders and midfielders – it’s easy to bemoan the standard of passing, but it’s a two way thing, there needs to be a desire from any receiver to help the passer by making delivery of the ball easier through their desire to find space, but, perhaps down to tiredness due to the shift they put in on Wednesday, it wasn’t really there from Messrs Moore, Wilson and Murphy.
The irony was that it was at a time when we were really struggling to get any sort of foothold in the game that we scored our goal – we’d absorbed a lot of Middlesbrough pressure without being able to get out when we finally managed to get a chance for Vaulks to send in a long throw and when it came, the ball ended up in the Boro net thanks to a pretty faint touch from Sean Morrison. The fact that our skipper still had his feet on the ground when he made contact with the ball must be a reason why Neil Warnock will have been furious at his defence. for conceding such a goal.
Before that, Harry Wilson had a free kick turned aside by home keeper Marcus Bettinelli and that was the sum total of City’s attacking efforts – two goal attempts and no corners.
However, although Middlesbrough were always the side trying to force the issue, their own lack of fire power was evident through the fact that Bettinelli’s pretty routine stop from Wilson was the best save of the game.
The home team have not been in the best of form lately and this showed with their almost complete lack of an end product to their attacking play – with City looking more comfortable after the break, I was just beginning to convince myself that we could see it through for a 1-0 win (we were never going to score a second goal) when we conceded what was a very lucky equaliser by the home side.
Boro’s good fortune began when Bettinelli scuffed his clearance along the ground, but the ball somehow found its way to the halfway line where some effective combination play down our left saw a dangerous looking cross played in which Aden Flint should have been able to deal with, but on an afternoon where composure was a notable absentee from the Cardiff ranks, the defender thrashed at the ball which rebounded off a home player back towards our goal, on to a Boro attacker’s head from which it looked to be going just wide until Paddy McNair netted from a yard or two out.
For all that it was an unlucky goal to concede, it would have been something of a travesty had we won – as explained earlier, there were reasons for our poor display and we, clearly, aren’t as bad a side as we looked today, but we were a horrible team to watch today.
It needs to be said though that, despite his culpability with the goal, Flint was part of a defensive trio which were largely responsible for us returning home with a point and an unbeaten record stretched to nine matches – Morrison and Flint were generally dominant and there was a trademark superb block by Curtis Nelson in the first half as the three of them ensured Phillips had a quiet afternoon of it.
Finally on the game, Mick McCarthy’s use, or non use, of substitutes raised some questions. Although there was a slight difference to the norm today with Wilson staying on about ten minutes longer than Murphy, you could generally set your watch in recent games by the change which sees the two of them go off to be replaced by Sheyi Ojo and Leandro Bacuna and, given our toils in the middle of the park, it was no surprise to see the fit again Joe Ralls on for Vaulks (we actually managed a few passes in central areas with Ralls on!).
However, given that he’s only scored once in more than two years at Cardiff and hardly has mountains of assists to his credit, the Bacuna move to play in a forward role looks increasingly like it’s done for its nuisance value (i.e putting defenders under pressure) than anything else – with Junior Hoilett available again, that would have been a move which suggested we were still looking to score again and you also have to ask why haven’t we seen anything of Jonny Williams if he has been fit enough to be a substitute in our last three matches?
Williams has a capacity to win plenty of free kicks when he is used by Wales and that would have been a good string to have to our bow today given our inability to make significant inroads into Middlesbrough territory, but our manager decided to make just the three changes which meant that there was another grueling ninety minutes for Moore whose body broke down under the strain of being used continuously back in December.
With Bournemouth beating Watford 1-0 and Barnsley keeping their fine run going with a 2-1 win over Millwall, our hold on sixth place proved to a very short one, but we’re right in the hunt for a Play Off place now and, with Jordi Osei-Tutu and Lee Tomlin, hopefully, rejoining the squad soon, we should have decent cover for all positions except striker where Keiffer Moore remains crucial to our hopes of a top six finish.
This weekend had a feel of back to normal to it after all of the victories of the last month or so, because, a few hours before the first team played, City’s Academy team ended their run of three straight wins when they were well beaten 4-1 at Ipswich – James Crole got our solitary goal as our youngsters struggled to come to terms with what is the longest trip of their league campaign..
Finally, it’s now less than a month to the fiftieth anniversary of our win over Real Madrid in the European Cup Winners Cup Quarter Final First Leg in March 1971. To commemorate that anniversary, I’ve written a book called Real Madrid and all that – details of which can be found below