A game at the New Den on a wet and miserable Saturday afternoon hardly seems an inspiring setting, but both sides managed to serve up a fine match which had a bit of everything. City scored first when Gary O’Neil, making the sort of run past the strikers our midfield players never seemed to come up with before he arrived, was played in by a clever Peter Thorne pass - O’Neil then cut inside a defender and dinked his shot over the keeper for a fine goal. City just about deserved their lead at the break, but the introduction of Neil Harris at half time had an immediate effect for the home team as he set up an equaliser on a plate for Tessem.
With Millwall seemingly determined to stop O’Neil by fair means or foul, tempers began to get a bit frayed and at one point Terry Burton ran on to remonstrate with opposing player/manager Dennis Wise after another bad foul on the City man. The fact that there was a bit of an edge to the game only seemed to add to it’s quality and Alan Lee restored our lead when he bundled in a corner in the 68th minute only for Harris to equalise shortly afterwards with a good far post header past Tony Warner who had to endure a predictable reception from the locals on his return to his old club!
Another draw meant that City had just one defeat to show from their last seven matches, but they still probably went to Bournemouth for their Third Round League Cup tie as underdogs - the home side were in great form having won their last four games and had scored an amazing 23 goals in their past eight matches, City on the other hand, were without the cup tied Williams and O’Neil as Lennie Lawrence gave some of his fringe players a chance to impress.
Nicky Fish became the fourth young player in recent weeks to make his City debut when he started in an unfamiliar right sided midfield role and his first start didn’t begin well when Hayter took advantage of a rare slip by Chris Barker to put the home side ahead inside the first ten minutes. City equalised against the run of play when Alan Lee headed home at the far post and there were signs they were getting on top as the first half came to an end.
It seemed a bit unfair to give Fish his first start in a position which, as far as I know, he had virtually no experience of playing in and, although he had a hand in City’s goal, he, hardly surprisingly, struggled to make an impact so it was no real surprise to see him withdrawn at half time to be replaced by Paul Parry.
The substitution definitely helped City as Parry started to cause problems straight away and they took the lead when Lee Bullock headed home from a corner. Significantly, this was the fourth successive match in which we had scored from corners - although Kav had returned for the Rotherham match after his suspension, he was no longer taking his corners which, especially from the right, often failed to get past the first defender and the improvement in our fortunes was plain to see! Gary O’Neil had taken the ones that led to goals against Rotherham and Brighton and it had been Joe Ledley’s corners that had brought the goals against Millwall and Bournemouth.
Although they had the odd dodgy moment, City were now more or less in control and wasted chances to make the game safe. When that happens, it is almost inevitable that you will get punished and that is exactly what happened in the last minute when Hayter’s second goal took the game into extra time. The extra time period brought a goal for either side with substitute Cameron Jerome showing pace and composure to score his first ever goal for us, only for Welsh Under 21 International Brian Stock to equalise again two minutes from time from a free kick (by this time City were down to ten men after Tony Vidmar had picked up his second red card of the season in a League Cup match).
The match therefore went to the lottery of a penalty shoot out and, this time, it worked out in City’s favour. The two most significant factors of the shoot out for me were the excellent penalty taken by young Byron Anthony and the fact that forgotten man Neil Alexander (only in the side because of squad rotation and a long term knee injury to Martyn Margetson) not only went the right way for one of the penalties but he actually saved it!
City were now into the last 16 of the tournament and having beaten three lower league clubs away from home, they finally got a home draw when they were paired with Premiership team Portsmouth in the next round.
League matters were far more important though at this stage, City were still too close to the bottom of the table for comfort and now had the opportunity to continue their improvement with two home games in the next week.
Gary O’Neil and Darren Williams returned to the team for the visit of Leicester but there were a couple of very significant enforced changes as well. Tony Vidmar’s suspension for his red card meant James Collins, who had come in against Bournemouth, retained his place and now he put his poor start to the season behind him as he turned in a series of fine performances - apart from a one match suspension, he never missed another game and his partnership with Danny Gabbidon in central defence became more and more influential as the season went on. The other change saw Paul Parry start in an unfamiliar striking role because Peter Thorne was ruled out with a recurrence of a neck injury which had effected him at times during the previous season - although Thorne was to return a month or so later, he never seemed quite as effective in the air as previously and I often found myself wondering whether he had fully recovered from his neck injury or not.
For the second time in about a month a newly relegated side were played off the park in a home game and yet escaped with a 0-0 draw, the first time Leeds were the opposition, this time it was a Leicester team being watched by their new manager Craig Levine. Leicester had been a lot of peoples pre season tips for the title, but too many drawn matches saw them nearer the bottom than the top of the table when they came to Ninian Park and they were in all sorts of trouble as a City side full of pacy players wanting to run at their opponents dominated. Leicester had their moments with Dion Dublin forcing a fine save from Tony Warner and then having a header cleared off the line by Danny Gabbidon, but, just as against Leeds, the Ninian Park woodwork took a battering as first half efforts by O’Neil and Parry rebounded off the frame of the goal. Add to this some fine saves from veteran keeper Kevin Pressman and you have a very frustrating afternoon for City players and supporters and when O’Neil’s marvellous late curling effort from about twenty five yards rebounded back off the post with Pressman helpless, you just knew City just weren‘t going to score even if they kept on playing until midnight!
Following this game Lennie Lawrence came out with the old manager’s cliché of “someone’s going to get a hammering off us soon” - the difference this time being that what he was saying was true and it was the Hammers that got the hammering!
One of my main moans about the City under Lennie Lawrence is that we start home matches too slowly and, too often, surrender the initiative with our timid approach. The facts back me up as well - the City had failed to score in the first ten minutes of the previous 41 home matches before West Ham’s visit on 2 November! Those who had figured that they could take their time finishing their pre-match pint safe in the knowledge that they wouldn’t be missing much got it wrong for the West Ham match though as Alan Lee scored from Paul Parry’s cross after just three minutes - I should point out however that since this game, normal service has been resumed and our 15 subsequent home matches failed to produce a goal for us in the first ten minutes which means we have only managed this achievement once in 57 league matches at Ninian Park!
Incredibly, this goal would turn out to be Alan Lee’s last in the league for the season - whilst the player could point to a month or so out with a hernia operation, this statistic said so much about the way Lee’s season went. Whilst he started it off pretty well, his performances tailed away after that and by the end he looked short of both confidence and fitness - it’s a shame that a player who looked so good when he first came here has deteriorated so much, but, with the club determined to cut the wage bill during the summer, Lee must be a prime candidate for a move away from Cardiff.
City didn’t take long in adding to Lee’s goal as local boy Joe Ledley expertly controlled Jobi McAnuff’s cross, stepped inside full back Mullins and shot past Bywater with his right foot after 16 minutes for a goal voted the best of our season and if Gary O’Neil’s free kick around the half hour mark had gone in instead of hitting the bar who knows what the final score would have been?
As it was, the visitors started to come back into the game towards the end of the half and could easily have got a goal back. The half time interval came at just the right time for us and ten minutes after the break we killed the game off when Alan Lee’s neat pass put Paul Parry clear and he calmly sidefooted home to put us three goals clear. City had kept clean sheets in their three previous home games as the early season defensive problems from dead ball situations began to fade away, but referee Richard Beeby ensured that this run would end when he harshly penalised Kav for a foul on Harewood and the striker beat Warner from the penalty spot. However, this was definitely City’s night and a quarter of an hour from the end, Jobi McAnuff swept in a Joe Ledley cross from close range to score against his former club - it was McAnuff’s first goal for us as well and completed what was to be our biggest win of the campaign.
Jobi McAnuff’s goal celebration was pretty low key no doubt because it came against his former club, but, low key or not, his first goal for City set the seal an a Man of the Match performance which added to what I think is the general view that he had been a good signing for us (rumour is that, but for a loan from director Michael Isaac, we would never have been able to afford him!).
However, there could be no doubting that the catalyst behind the good form being shown by the likes of McAnuff, Parry, Ledley and Kav was Gary O’Neil who, besides all of his other talents, seemed to have the ability to bring out the best in the players around him. I had read a match report on a Leicester website about the 0-0 draw his team and the City had played out a few days earlier - most of it was the usual stuff you get from websites with virtually everything being looked at from the perspective of the writer’s club, but this guy had found the time to say that O’Neil was “a player who was obviously too good for the Championship”. Now, if a typically one eyed supporter of an opposing team can recognise that in one of the players up against his team, then it would be ridiculous to assume that news of O’Neil’s excellent displays for us were not getting back to Harry Redknapp at Portsmouth.
On the face of it, news that O’Neil’s and Darren Williams’ loans had been extended to the maximum allowed of three months seemed good news, but it was a double edged sword because it also meant that thet, unlike in the first month of their loans, their clubs could now recall them at any time. Bearing this in mind, when Portsmouth were heavily beaten by Aston Villa on the morning of Saturday 6 November, it wasn’t too surprising to hear rumours that Portsmouth were on the brink of recalling O’Neil.
Whatever the future held for Gary O’Neil he was available for City’s match that afternoon which, by a quirk of the fixture list, was away at Rotherham who they had played just three weeks earlier. The Yorkshire team were now rooted to the bottom of the table and still looking for their first win.
Rotherham’s plight combined with our good form must have been the prompt for the first appearance of the season of the Lennie Lawrence “win this one and we can forget about relegation for the rest of the season” quote. There were four or five sightings of this pretty rare creature throughout the winter, these sightings always coincided with a decent run of City form and tended to have the same effect that a sighting of an albatross did with sailors in the past - it was a harbinger of bad news and, in this case, the City’s form always suffered accordingly!
On the face of it, a 2-2 away draw doesn’t look a bad result, but when you consider that City had been 2-0 up and needed an outstanding late save from Tony Warner to preserve their point, it doesn’t looked as good - Lennie Lawrence certainly didn’t think it was as he bemoaned a late surrender of three points which he thought could have far reaching effects on our season, people are, rightly, quick to criticise our manager when he makes daft statements, but, in this case, he was to be proved right.
A second successive goal by Joe Ledley (this one a an angled left foot drive from the edge of the box) had put City ahead as late as the 70th minute. Ledley’s goal had been a good one, but when it was eclipsed four minutes later by a terrific rising shot by Paul Parry, City should have been home and dry, but Rotherham, whose confidence must have been at rock bottom by now, were allowed back into the game. Tony Warner was certainly unlucky to have Paul McLaren’s fine shot rebound off the crossbar on to the back of his head and into the net, but it was his punch out which had gone straight to the Rotherham player in the first place.
Six minutes after Parry’s goal should have killed the game off, Rotherham were level as Proctor smashed a terrific shot from about twenty five yards past the helpless Warner and by the end it was City not the home side who were desperate for the final whistle.
Supporters worst fears were confirmed after the game when it was announced that Gary O’Neil was being recalled by Portsmouth. A long injury list at Portsmouth was given as the reason for this decision, but you couldn’t help thinking that it was just that O’Neil had been playing too well for us!
So just how good was Gary O’Neil? Some respected posters on here who have been watching the team for a very long time maintain that he was the best midfield player they have ever seen play for the club and it has to be admitted that he had a great influence on the whole team while he was with us. What I liked about him was that he was a complete player able to match very good skills and technique with a willingness to do the graft and cover as much of the pitch as he could, he also seemed to seek responsibility - whereas some players would go missing when things got tough, O’Neil seemed to prosper in such circumstances (it was easy to see why he was captain of his country’s Under 21 team). Yet, taking all of this into account, I couldn’t say he was the best midfield player I have seen at the club for two reasons, firstly, he wasn‘t with us long enough - say he had been playing for us six months later, would he still be playing as well as he did when he first came here (I suspect he would, but I don’t know that for certain). Secondly, for all the improvement in the team while he was with us (and he has to take credit for an awful lot of that), he didn’t inspire us to too many victories - we only won three of the nine games he played for us (and in the first of those, at Wolves, he only featured for the last ten minutes or so when he came off the bench).
Lennie Lawrence made some noises about resurrecting O’Neil’s loan when Portsmouth’s injury problems subsided or even that we may sign him permanently in the future, but, surely, we have seen the last of him in a City shirt? Even if our financial position was to be transformed overnight, O’Neil went straight into the Portsmouth team for their next league game and, more or less, stayed in the team for the rest of the season - he is out of our league now in more ways than one!
Ironically, O’Neil’s first game back in Portsmouth colours should have been the League Cup tie at Ninian Park three days after the Rotherham match, but an injury (convenient or what!) kept him out, so City supporters weren‘t given the opportunity to thank him for the brilliant job he did in the six weeks or so he was with us - on a personal level, I felt privileged to have seen him play for us. Sam Hamman, rightly as far as I am concerned, has come in for an awful lot of stick in the last few months, but his critics (me for example) should never lose sight of the fact that, without him, we would never have seen a player of O’Neil’s quality in our team.
As for the players that remained at Ninian Park, the challenge for them was to prove that the improvement in the last ten games or so had not been solely down to O’Neil and that they could maintain their form without the talismanic midfielder - you have to see that, based on the sides results up until the Christmas period, it was a challenge they failed to conquer!
For forty five minutes against Portsmouth, City comfortably held their Premiership opponents, but only to the extent that neither side had looked like scoring - defensively City were sound, but offensively they had little or nothing to offer. I am sure there were plenty in the crowd thinking at half time that Portsmouth were capable of upping their game a bit whereas it was doubtful whether we could do the same and, in the opening ten minutes of the second half, that is precisely what Portsmouth did. Firstly, some slack defending allowed Lua Lua to get clear down the right and present Yakubu with an easy chance, Tony Warner did marvellously to block the strikers first effort but was powerless to stop him knocking the ball in when the it rebounded back to him. Eight minutes later the tie was all over - if the penalty Kav gave away a week earlier against West Ham was a dodgy one, there was no doubt about this one as he sent Taylor sprawling and Yakabu duly knocked in the spot kick.
There wasn’t any disgrace in losing to a side from a higher league, but, that said, there were worrying similarities between this defeat and some of the horror shows of August and September as the Boland/Kavanagh midfield central midfield combination looked laboured and lacking in creativity when compared to what we had been watching in that area of the pitch in recent weeks.
The cup tied Darren Williams returned for Tony Vidmar for a tough looking trip to Reading and, although the final scoreline may have been close, the manner of the performance suggested that City’s season had taken a definite turn for the worse. Reading effectively won the game in the first forty minutes through goals by Morgan whose low shot beat Warner on his near post despite the fact that it didn’t seem to be that well hit and Kitson (who, for some reason, Lennie Lawrence had decided to criticise in his pre match press conference!) who burst impressively past Gabbidon, Collins and Warner. City were creating very little and ten minutes after the break a very tough task became an impossible one when Kav was given a straight red card (harshly in my view) for stamping on Sidwell. To their credit, City did rally towards the end with Cameron Jerome scoring his first league goal with a header from a free kick and there were one or two other hairy moments for Reading at the end, but, in reality, their 2-1 win had been a comfortable one.
Kav’s sending off meant an automatic three match ban kept him out of the televised home game against a Preston team with a feeble away record the following Friday and, in his absence, Lee Bullock was given a chance to stake a claim for a regular place in central midfield. In the event, the match was virtually a replay of the televised Plymouth game three months earlier as all the Boland/Bullock combination succeeded in doing was to make supporters think that maybe the Boland/Kav partnership wasn‘t that bad after all!
The comparison with earlier games went as far as City repeating the poor defending from set pieces that dogged the early weeks of the season as an unmarked Mawene scored from a corner after 14 minutes for the games only goal. Preston were as bad as their awful away record indicated they were, but for a lot of the time City were worse. To be fair to them, City’s frenzied second half pressure probably meant a draw would have been the fairest result but some good saves from former manager Bobby Gould’s son Jonathan meant that even a point was beyond - all of the good work of October and early November was being very quickly wasted.
Just one last thing about that Preston match, Danny Thomas had become another youngster to make his first team debut when he came on for Chris Barker after 82 minutes, but, as far as I can recall, he didn’t touch the ball once during that time. As he hasn’t appeared in the first team since and was released by us yesterday, it could be that the poor lads league career will amount to those eight minutes when he didn’t kick the ball!