Nine days ago, Cardiff City played what had the potential to be a season defining game at Oxford United as the lack of character and spirit shown as they slumped to 3-2 defeat that was a lot worse than the score suggested screamed out this was a team headed for relegation.
I was so annoyed at what I had seen that, very unusually for this blog, I decided to name names of players who I thought were most responsible for this season turning into one relegation struggle too many for the club.
My reaction was pretty typical of City fans as, for the first time, it was the players whose performance was being examined closely under the critical microscope, not that of the owner/Board or the manager.
Based on what we’d seen in about two thirds of our fixtures so far, I expected things to get worse from this low point because , frankly, nothing at the club was working well. The owner and the Board were, well, what they always are, the rookie manager looked to be at a loss to know what to do next and the players were probably going to start feeling sorry for themselves.
However, there was also the chance that some good could come from the disaster- from adversity there could spring dramatic recovery.
Of course, three games in little over a week is not enough evidence to start stating categorically that corners have been turned, I’m certain that the Boxing Day Bluebirds would be looking at no points from a possible nine, not the five the team has gained from two very tough away games against top six sides and a winnable home game made unwinnable by an officious and inept replacement referee whose actions are not justified by the predictable rejection of Callum Robinson’s appeal against the straight red card he received for alleged violent conduct.
City faced adversity at Watford six days ago and came away with a first away win of the campaign, they had to play with a man short for half of the home game with Coventry on New Year’s Day and held on to their 1-1 draw and today they spent most of their game at the Riverside Stadium against a highly rated Middlesbrough team on the back foot and again emerged with a 1-1 draw.
This is a group of players that were telling everyone who would listen that they were behind Omar Riza a couple of months ago and then spent much of the time up to and including our Boxing Day game making it look like they were having a laugh when they said it. Yet, there can be no doubt that what we’ve seen in the last three games is a squad fully behind their manager.
Another thing that has been clear is that besides the positional and system changes that have seen us switch from three at the back with wing backs to a flat back four with Callum Chambers converted to a sitting midfielder from his place in the back three, there have also been tactical switches.
We’re seeing less of the short goal kicks to split centrebacks, less building out from the back, more long balls aimed towards a centre forward (today it was Rubin Colwill!) – we’ve become more direct and possession figures of twenty seven, twenty seven and twenty five tell their own story.
We’re back playing a version of Warnockball, Sladeball, McCarthyball or whatever you want to call it and speaking as someone who has had their fill of such an approach in recent years, I find it annoying and immensely frustrating that we do not seem to have it in us to play a more attractive and watchable brand of football.
The thing is though that in my blog piece on the Oxford game I said that anyone watching the first half an hour would have seen that we had players who were better technically than theirs. However they wouldn’t have seen anything to indicate that we were putting that area of superiority to any advantage. We passed the ball around quite neatly in front of Oxford and were up in the sixties with our possession, but our opponents just bided their time and picked us off three times in about a quarter of an hour to decide the game.
Oxford was a more extreme example of so many home games where there was plenty of backwards and sideways passing, allied to a soft centre at the back and the usual lack of an incisive final ball.
It seems to me that Callum Chambers was essential to summer plans to introduce a more modern way of playing, he was signed as much to be passer out from the back in chief and his defending was something of an afterthought.
Chambers at centreback was not working and I freely admit he was right up there at the top of the list of players I singled out for criticism in my piece on the Boxing Day game.
Instead of dropping him though, Riza decided to move Chambers into midfield reminding people like me that he had a fairly productive spell as a number six type player in the Premier League with Fulham I think it was.
With the objective of the exercise being to make us more resilient and defensively secure, pairing Chambers and Manolis Siopis in central midfield has been a success, but I still can’t help thinking that this new Cardiff City might not be enough to keep us up.
I say that because while we may be harder to beat, is the sort of side we’ve been putting out lately going to earn us the wins we’ll need? It seems to me that we’re going to need seven or eight wins through the second half of the season compared to the five we managed in the first half.
There is still a chronic lack of pace in our squad – Omer Riza lamented the absence of Isaak Davies a few days ago while noting that Cian Ashford and Ollie Tanner were pretty quick, but it was instructive today to see how quickly Middlesbrough’s right back Anfernee Dijksteel caught up with Tanner today on a couple of occasions when our winger had found himself a yard or two in front of him.
With Chambers and Siopis in central midfield and Alex Robertson playing as the closest thing we have to a number ten, it seems to me that a team that was really short of goals when it had four attack minded players is trying to get away with having just three of them.
There are no easy answers to such problems, but, even a critic like me when it comes to this way of playing has to concede that we look more like a team which can escape the drop with the changes that have been made than we did beforehand. However, this really does feel like the most important January transfer window we’ve had in ages because, for example, Middlesbrough wouldn’t have been able to press us as relentlessly as they did if we had someone with Ben Doak type pace in our team to remind defenders that there was a capability of damaging them from a ball played into space behind them.
Doak was the game’s outstanding figure today and Callum O’Dowda must have been glad to see him switched to the left flank to torment Andy Rinomhota as he’d picked up a booking quite early for fouling the flying Scotsman early on.
In fact, the ease with which Doak went past O’Dowda in Middlesbrough’s goal on eleven minutes suggested that we could be in for the sort of comprehensive defeat I said I feared in the Feedback section earlier today.
It was all so straightforward as Doak got around our left back on the outside to cut back a low cross that was efficiently converted on the near post by Emmanuel Latte Lath. It was the sort of goal we don’t score because we don’t have wingers who can beat full backs for speed like Doak did or strikers who make scoring look as easy as Latte Lath did.
For a few minutes after that! It looked we were going to be in for a long afternoon trying to keep the score down – we’d come very close to scoring after just three minutes when Tanner did well to turn inside and get away a shot which looked bound for the top corner until Tom Glover sprung to his left to make a fine save.
That looked like being our one and only chance for the afternoon as Middlesbrough took control, but, in fact, for all of the speed with which they passed the ball at times, the virtuoso talent of Doak and a feeling that we were hanging on at times, Boro only ended up with nine goal attempts to our eight.
Nevertheless, City’s goal was a surprise when it came in the twenty first minute as Siopis’ clever chip found Tanner on the far post and although the home defence managing to half clear the ball, it fell to Chambers on the edge of the penalty area whose instant shot flew in via the underside of the crossbar.
It was the sort of classy finish that raised the question as to why it was only Chambers’ tenth career goal – yes, he’s been a defender for most of that time, but you’d have thought someone who can finish like that could have doubled that tally at least.
Having got themselves back into things, the pattern for the rest of the game was now set with us sitting back determined to hold on to the point we had.
At this point I have to say that I could understand why the home crowd were becoming increasingly dissatisfied with referee Tom Nield who was doing Boro no favours with his decision making. There were four or five close offside decisions which went in our favour and I was surprised at some of the free kicks he gave us for fouls while, it seemed to me that there were a couple of occasions where he slowed down the impetus of a Boro attack by getting in the way of the man in possession.
So, we may have had a little help from the man with whistle, but with Dimi Goutas having a fine game, Jesper Daland being encouragingly decisive with his defending and Rinomhota continuing to be a success at right back in terms of the defensive side of the game, City probably defended as well as they’ve done in an away game this season.
When they were opened up, Jak Alnwick was there to deny Latte Lath with a great save from his close range header. The City keeper was helped by the fact that the striker, who has been linked with Premier League Leicester in recent days, didn’t get the best of contacts with his header. However, the clearest chance of the second half probably fell to Colwill, who I thought did pretty well in his unfamiliar role, but he should have done better than head Chambers’ inch perfect cross about a yard wide from a fairly central position six yards out.
Boro had got increasingly frustrated as illustrated by Doak’s petulant kick at Ashford after he’d done well to rob the winger and City could no doubt travel home satisfied with both a point and a resolute showing – the foundations for a revival to take us out of, and clear of, the bottom three look to be in place, but I still think we’re going to need the sort of specialists in forward areas we currently lack to complete the job.