Although not making the headlines that it had done when the story first broke, the Langston law suit was still bubbling away in the background and, having been pretty dismissive of the matter back in August, Peter Ridsdale now appeared to be taking the whole thing more seriously. I have already mentioned his "£20,000 a day legal costs" statement and he was now saying that other issues had to be put on the back burner because most of his time was spent preparing for City's day in count. As to when that would be, well at that time it looked like mid November because Langston were pushing ahead with a request for "summary judgement" which meant that they wanted the judge to decide that the club had no defence to offer and that he should find in the plaintiff's favour without the need for a Hgh Court hearing.
To my less than razor sharp legal mind, this appeared to be a waste of everyone's time - according to our Chairman at least, a fortune was being spent in preparing for a case where it seemed ridiculous to suppose that the club's argument would be so flimsy as to persuade the judge that, in essence, it did not represent a defence! To that extent, it was hard for me to think of the summary judgment case as having winners and losers, surely the judge would just refer the case on to the High Court for it to be decided at a later date? All in all, it was difficult not to conclude that someone at Langston seemed in urgent need of some money!
City returned to action with their league season still able to go one of two ways - they were in twelfth position six points off an automatic promotion place and five points above the bottom three. Unfortunately, it was the latter of these two options that became relevant to City fans over the next month as the season descended into crisis with manager Dave Jones coming under real pressure from supporters for the first time in his City career.
On the face of it, the televised match at Southampton meant one thing - goals! The Saints had scored an impressive nineteen times in ten league matches, but they had conceded a whopping twenty three and, with City being the leading away scorers in the Championship at this stage and the home side going through an injury crisis in central defence, surely the team would be filling their boots at St. Mary's Stadium?
The first few minutes certainly suggested that would be the case - they should have had a penalty in the first forty five seconds when Fowler went down in the box and City, with McPhail back in the middle of midfield for Ledley who moved back to the left went on to dominate possession and territory for the whole ninety minutes against a poor Southampton side. However, the finishing touch was not there as shots flew wide and passes went astray and on thirteen minutes Idiakez's precise pass exploited a huge gap in the middle of City's defence for Stern John to take on and fire past Oakes.
This was one of only two shots on target that Southampton had all afternoon, but it won the match for them. City huffed and puffed for the remainder of the match, but, never really looked convincing. Trevor Sinclair (who had seemingly recovered from the injury that was to blight his season) came off the bench to replace Ledley, Whittingham for Parry and MacLean for McNaughton, but it made no difference - Fowler, Parry and Whittingham all missed decent chances and, once again, you were left feeling that, on the balance of play, the better team had lost, but this was happening too often now for this City team as questions began to be asked about whether the side was ruthless enough and whether they had the stomach for a fight.
It was somehow typical that, just as the team took a step towards getting things right at home, they surrendered their unbeaten away record. However, if they could take advantage of the opportunity presented by three consecutive league matches at Ninian Park, then things would start looking far more healthy. First up were Wolves who had been a lot of peoples pre season favourites for the title - they had made a somewhat low key start to the campaign but came into the match on a five match unbeaten run and in fourth position in the table.
Although the eventual result meant that it wasn't much of a consolation, this was one of the more entertaining matches played at Ninian Park during the season. An even start saw City miss a great chance when Hasslebaink's lovely dummy saw Fowler being put clean through, as the striker dinked the ball over the advancing Hennessey, the crowd cleared it's throat to cheer the inevitable goal only to see the shot drift wide! It was an awful miss by a player who, notwithstanding the downturn in his career in the last few years, still retained his ability as a finisher and City were made to pay after thirteen minutes when Keogh laid a goal on a plate for the highly rated Michael Kightly.
As a rule, City don't react well to going 1-0 down, but this time they did and, within a quarter of an hour, they were in front - Ledley was clearly fouled in the penalty area by Henry and, his earlier miss notwithstanding, Fowler very calmly rolled in the resultant spot kick and four minutes later Paul Parry skinned left back Collins, not for the first or last time, and crossed for Fowler who showed great vision to knock the ball back to the unmarked Hasselbaink who finished well from fifteen yards.
City saw out the rest of the half with relatively few alarms and went in at the break just about deserving their 2-1 lead. However, the second period proved to be a different kettle of fish - Wolves swapped Ward for Gibson and Eastwood for Keogh and continuously forced City back (actually, whether Wolves were forcing them back or whether they were sitting back allowing Wolves on to them was a moot point!). With a mixture of luck and last ditch defending it looked as if City may have weathered the siege on sixty six minutes when they finally gained a foothold deep inside the Wolves half with a throw in pretty close to the corner flag. Unfortunately, in a manner which seemed to me to speak volumes about the levels of confidence in the camp, they chose to go backwards as Loovens turned and hit a long back pass to Oakes from a position still inside the opposing half - City never recovered from this negative approach as Oakes' kick didn't have enough distance on it and Wolves broke with Kightly outmuscling Loovens before sending a shot across Oakes and into the net.
Things got even worse eight minutes later when City, once again, conceded from a dead ball situation as centre half Craddock headed in from about ten yards. Wolves were able to see out the game with very few problems as City slipped to a fourth defeat in their first six home league games. This was nowhere near good enough and the rumblings from supporters against manager, team and chairman grew louder - it was after this match that I became a fully paid up (temporary) member of the Dave Jones out camp!
When the side were progressing through to the latter stages of the FA Cup and just about keeping themselves in contention for a Play Off spot, people who had wanted a change in manager back in the autumn were presented as some sort of knee jerking mindless minority. Everybody was at it - Dave Jones was, Peter Ridsdale was praising himself for sticking by our manager, the media were queuing up to do it, pundits within the game were and so were plenty on here.
The thing is though, back in October/November there were genuine grounds for questioning whether Dave Jones deserved to keep his job - I didn't start saying Dave Jones should go because we lost successive matches against Southampton and Wolves and I'm guessing most who were in the "Dave Jones Out" brigade at the time didn't either. What had me advocating a change of manager was the sustained period over which we been showing relegation form.
On 17 October 2006 we beat Southampton 1-0 to go six points clear at the top of the table. The Wolves match was played on 24 October 2007 and that defeat meant that our league record since the high of just over a year earlier read;-
P 46 W 11 D 15 L 20 f 49 a 62 Pts 48
so the Wolves match completed what was the equivalent of a full league season of matches since Thommo had scored that late goal to beat Southampton. The forty eight points we picked up in that period would have got us comfortably relegated in the season just finished and in nine out the sixteen other seasons since the Championship was extended to 24 clubs in 92/03 as well. That is why I believe it was right to call for a change of manager at that time - fair play to Dave Jones, he has turned it around since then, but an awful lot of managers with better records than the one I have listed did not survive in their jobs. For example, Martin Allen, Ian Holloway, Ian Dowie, Steve Cotterill, Bryan Robson and Peter Taylor all lost their jobs without having a record as bad as Dave Jones' between October 2006 and October 2007.
Another reason I had for questioning whether Dave Jones was the right man for the job was that there was growing evidence that the team that he had put together had a midfield section and a striking department that were incompatible with each other.
At the time there was a big debate on here about whether the strikers were not being well served by the midfielders or vice versa. Those who chose to defend Hasselbaink and Fowler had a fair bit of ammunition to back their argument up with - both players had scored in the Wolves match and this meant that our veteran strikers had scored eleven goals between them in the last eight matches. If that scoring record had been carried on over the course of a full season then there is no doubt that we would have been in the Premiership now, but that was it as good as it got for our strike force that had a combined age of sixty seven at that time- Fowler had finished his goalscoring contribution for the season and Hasselbaink who, credit to him, was available for selection in virtually every game, only scored another four league goals.
Some of the combination play between the two strikers in the Wolves match (e.g. Hasselbaink's dummy that put Fowler through on goal and Fowler's lay off to Hasselbaink for the second goal) showed that they could cause Championship defences problems with the right sort of service, so, surely, the fault was with the midfield for not providing them with that proper service?
Well, my answer to that question is no not really which only goes to show that I believed that the fault lie more with our strikers than our midfield. In my view, Fowler and Hasselbaink were to be seen at their best when receiving short range passes around the edge of the penalty area. However, to be able to do that, our midfield players needed to know that the ball would "stick" with our front men when it was played up to them because then they be able to make forward runs without the ball flying back past them as the opponents counter attacked. Fowler and Hasselbaink were unable to do this because neither of them were natural target men.
Another way our midfield players could have got into the positions where they could have served our strike pair better would have been if they would have had players in front of them capable of making runs at pace into the channels because this would have bought them the time they needed to get into attacking areas of the pitch (McPhail to Chopra the previous season had been the sort of combination I mean). This just never happened with Fowler and Hasselbaink because, at this stage of their careers, they didn't possess either the pace or mobility to play in such a manner.
Therefore, when a City midfield player got the ball in a position from which they would be looking to launch a quick counter attack, their only option was usually a pass that had to be accurately threaded to Fowler and Hasslebaink, often from a distance of about twenty yards or more, and then even if they could do that, as I have mentioned before, there was a fair chance that the ball wouldn't stick with our strikers.
Anyway, it could be argued that debating whether it was the midfielders or strikers who were to blame for poor start was ignoring the fact that our defending had left a lot to be desired. After all, one clean sheet in twelve league matches was hardly a record to be proud of. At the end of the season, Roger Johnson and Glenn Loovens almost tied for first place in the Player of the year poll but it shouldn't be forgotten that at this time Dave Jones was operating a rotation policy as far as our centre backs were concerned - this wasn't because he was concerned with how they were coping with the rigorous schedule of the Championship, it was because all three of them were making mistakes and playing below the level of the previous season!
It didn't help either that Tony Capaldi was hardly making a great start to his City career - later in the season, Dave Jones dropped hints that, for whatever reason, Capaldi had a few problems getting settled in South Wales, but what couldn't be denied was that his performances were making the option of switching Kevin McNaughton to left back and bringing in Chris Gunter look a very attractive one to many supporters!
Inevitably, given what had happened to Neil Alexander, the goalkeeping position came under much scrutiny as well. Ross Turnbull had not convinced, perhaps he had not conceded too many goals, but, for me at least, so many of the ones he did let in were his fault. With Michael Oakes it was different - it was hard to pin the blame for any one goal on him, we were just conceding so many (thirteen in seven games) when he played!
All of this needs to be borne in mind when anyone questions why Dave Jones was under so much pressure last autumn - the facts show that he had presided over the equivalent of a full league season of relegation form and it was increasingly looking as if he had spent a lot of money in "enhanced wages" in putting together a team that wasn't performing adequately in all areas of the pitch!
The fact that City had problems was really brought home by Peter Ridsdale loosening the purse strings to the extent that we made an all too rare foray into the loan market to sign Man City's Kasper Schmeichel for a month. Schmeichel had started the season as first choice keeper at his club, but had been overtaken in the pecking order by Joe Hart and manager Sven Goran Eriksson must have thought it better that he gain experience playing first team football elsewhere rather than sit on the bench at Man City. There was no doubt that Schmeichel had the heritage and talent to become a very good keeper and I reckon that most supporters thought that we had made a goods signing at the time, but the truth of that matter was that over the next few weeks the situation at Ninian Park was to get worse both on and off the pitch.
TBC