It’s strange how it seems like we’ve been living with Covid on our shores for ages and yet it seems like only yesterday when the way, way too soon death of the great Peter Whittingham was announced and yet the UK first went into lockdown on 23 March 2020 some five days after Whitts’ passing from head injuries suffered on 7 March was confirmed.
So, it’s been a long time for a formal recognition by the club of someone who all but the very youngest or newest City fan will have such fond memories of in the blue shirt to take place.
The blame for this can be put almost entirely on the aforesaid Covid, but, finally, a memorial match for Whitts was played last night between City and his first club Aston Villa in front of what I’d say was a good sized crowd of 10,027 at Cardiff City Stadium. With the distraction of the World Cup and it being the last night of November with temperatures taking a dip from the almost balmy weather of recent weeks in the last few days, that seems a good turn out to me and special praise goes to the six hundred Villa fans who made the trip down from the Midlands.
A couple of Whitts’ former team mates arrived from outside the UK to honour him. Aron Gunnarsson from Qatar and Steve McPhail from Ireland, while others came from around the UK including Roger Johnson, Matt Connolly and David Marshall and the man who signed him for City, Dave Jones, was also there – apologies to those I’ve not mentioned.
All proceeds from the game went towards the PW7 Foundation .
As for the match itself, the last similar type game for a long serving City player was the one held for Kevin McNaughton held in March 2017 which was between his team and one selected by Craig Bellamy. There are two types of testimonial game in my experience, there’s the light hearted one where everyone has a bit of a jolly with “guest” appearances from non players and the McNaughton one fell into that category as his ream ended up winners after a penalty shoot out following a 5-5 draw.
Last night was an example of the second type where it was a “proper” game that was played as if it mattered. Obviously, both teams were not at full strength because of World Cup commitments, but, within those confines, the teams were as strong as they could be with Villa including named like Digne, Mings, Young, Buendia, Watkins, Luiz, Ings and Bailey all playing at least forty five minutes.
Although there were some complaints about the timing of the game, it probably helped in some respects because the mid season break for Premier League and Championship clubs may have given the match more importance in terms of fitness and preparedness for the resumption of fixtures which comes a week on Saturday for City and on Boxing Day for Villa.
So, if I had to come up with a measure of the intensity at which the game was played, I’d go for the last pre season game a week before the proper stuff starts – it wasn’t like a league game, but the outcome seemed to matter to both teams.
For City, the absence of Rubin Colwill, Mark Harris and Callum Robinson left gaps in their squad up front and so they started with Gavin Whyte, Ollie Tanner and Kion Etete as a front three. Given our scoring record this season. It was hard to imagine City scoring unless it became one of those light hearted testimonials I mentioned earlier, but it turned out that they need no help in scoring – all three of the makeshift front line did well, especially Tanner and Etete.
Tanner and Etete probably attracted more comment than most of our seventeen summer signings, but, with Tanner finding the transition from non league part timer to full time pro the test that most in his position would do and Etete hit by an injury which kept him out for about six weeks, they’ve almost become forgotten men as the weeks went by.
However, both of them did not look out of place against Premier League opposition and Etete especially will have not done his first team prospects any harm at all.
Tanner had already done a few good things when City gained possession deep inside Villa’s half on forty minutes and the former Lewes player made ground down the left before hitting a low shot from fifteen yards across the keeper and into the corner of the net.
With City bringing on a new keeper and defence at half time and Villa making changes which, if anything, left their side stronger than it had been, that single goal lead seemed almost irrelevant. However, when a smooth build up saw Neils Nkounkou put in a neat low cross on fifty three minutes, Etete finished in impressive fashion with a first time effort from around the penalty spot.
Although the lack of meetings between the two teams down the years has played a large part in this stat, I make it that Villa had not scored a goal against City in Cardiff since December 1974 and Jak Alnwick will probably swear that they shouldn’t have scored tonight as he claimed a foul by Jacob Ramsey in the act of him heading in Luiz’s corner four minutes after Etete’s goal.
City brought on youngsters James Crole, Joel Colwill, Caleb Hughes and Morgan Wigley in the last half an hour and it was the last named who made the most impressive single contribution of the four on seventy three minutes with a quick and powerful run down the left and a fine cross which the unmarked Etete headed in from six yards.
City played some nice stuff and deserved their 3-1 win as, from their perspective anyway. They achieved a treble in honouring a fine player and getting a win to send them into the second part of the campaign in good heart while also having a group of younger players advance their cause in a competitive, if not “official” game.
The only slight disappointing feature for me was that the match would have been an ideal opportunity to give Ebou Adams and Isaak Davies their first game time of the season, but their absence suggests that they’re still not ready to play yet. That said, there is an Under 21 game against Wolves on Saturday afternoon, so maybe they were being kept back for that
Just to go back to Whitts to finish, I took the easy option in the title I gave this piece because I honestly cannot make a case for anyone else being City’s best player of this century, but could I have said he was our best player ever?
It’s probably impossible to make a judgement like that when you’re talking about anything that’s been going longer than the human life span and this is even more true when you consider that there are very few, if any, moving pictures of City’s best players of the 1920s out there.
However, I’d ask any one who is considering the question of who is City’s best player to have a look at this video of almost every league goal Whitts scored for us . From memory, there was a scruffy goal in a win at Norwich, the one he got in the 2-1 win over Leicester in the game Gabor Gyepes got sent off in would win no awards for style, but, apart from that, it seems all his goals which weren’t penalties would be called beauties if they had been scored by anyone else – the man really did do what he wanted.