Gradually City began to warm to their task a little and the visitors highly rated keeper Joe Murphy was forced into some pretty routine saves. However, the goal with which City took the lead came from out of the blue really as Hasselbaink got free down the right and his cross was volleyed in from about six yards out. My immediate thought when the ball hit the net was "surely that wasn't McPhail?", but indeed it was and, at the sixtieth time of asking, our midfield player had finally opened his goalscoring account for the club!
The remaining eight minutes of the first half saw City dominate, but they didn't carry that momentum into the second half and there were signs of a Scunthorpe equaliser to be seen before it eventually arrived ten minutes into the second half when Goodwin's angled drive went through Schmeichel and into the net. City's level of performance began to improve when Steve Thompson replaced the very disappointing Fowler around the hour mark as they finally appeared to realise that they should be testing substitute keeper Josh Lillis who had replaced the injured Murphy at half time. Unfortunately, as City upped the pressure, Lillis responded well with three good stops and, with Darren Purse's header from a corner being cleared off the line by Taylor as well, City had to settle for a 1-1 draw which did little to dispel the rumblings of discontent around Ninian Park.
At least the long awaited League Cup tie at Liverpool would take minds off City's league problems for a while. Much of the pre match talk had centred on Robbie Fowler's return to Liverpool and, with 6,000 City fans in a virtual full house of 41,780 looking on, he almost made it a fairy tale comeback in the fourth minute with a free kick that keeper Itandje turned aside. The truth was though that Fowler made little impact after that as City rode their luck at times against what was a shadow Liverpool team. They got to half time at 0-0 though only to fall behind three minutes after the restart when El Zhar scored with a fine shot from twenty five yards.
City's response to falling behind was impressive and Ledley was only foiled by a good save, but, shortly afterwards, Darren Purse sent the visiting supporters into raptures when he nodded home a Parry free kick. If only City could have then had a quiet five minutes or so they may have had chances of pulling off a famous victory, but straight from the kick off Liverpool went down the pitch and Steven Gerrard beat Michael Oakes (who had been a good deputy for the cup tied Kasper Schmeichel on the night) to regain the lead.
The dying minutes saw City pushing forward but it was more in hope than expectation as Paul Parry was unable to take a half chance that came his way and their good run in the League Cup ended in a defeat which at least saw them head back to South Wales with their honour intact. Whether the same could be said about Dave Jones though was another matter as, in what appeared to be a reaction to the pressure he was coming under, he ended his post match press conference by wishing one of the assembled hacks "a shit journey home"!
There was a legacy to the Liverpool cup tie that left City without a game the following weekend. Originally they had been due to play at Blackpool on the Saturday, but this had been switched to the Friday night on police advice. However, Liverpool had played Arsenal on the Sunday of the previous weekend and so decided to put the City match back from the Tuesday to the Wednesday evening which meant that, rather than face two matches in forty eight hours, City asked for the Blackpool match to be postponed and rescheduled. I suppose that it could be argued that this was a good thing given the teams miserable results at the time, but much more important than that, many supporters had made arrangements to spend the weekend in Blackpool and now faced a blank weekend.
For me, the whole episode offered more evidence of the way the Premiership and the teams within it ride rough shod over everyone else. On the face of it, Liverpool's decision to put the game back twenty four hours was a reasonable one, but when you consider that only four members of the sixteen man squad that faced Arsenal played against City (and two of them only came on as subs!), surely they could have gone ahead with original Tuesday kick off, thereby allowing the Blackpool game to be played on the Friday?
With the season in one of it's phases where the games come thick and fast, you would have thought that City's veteran strikers would have been grateful of the six day break the Blackpool postponement gave them before they were next in action against a Crystal Palace team that were struggling in twenty third position going and with only one win in their last fifteen matches.
Palace had appointed Neil Warnock as manager around a month earlier but he had not overseen an improvement in results. However, in complete contrast to Dave Jones, he was prepared to give youth a chance in an attempt to turn things around and Palace included 15 year old midfielder John Bostock in the starting line up and 16 year old Victor Moses on the bench.
Palace should have been there for the taking especially when Darren Purse exploited some woeful marking to head in a corner from about six yards out after nine minutes, but City weren't good enough to take advantage of the visitor's lack of confidence and, although they wobbled for a while after conceding the goal, they gradually got back into the game.
The visitors were helped in this though by an awful refereeing performance by Lee Mason who, amazingly on this evidence, officiated in eight Premiership matches during the season. City found themselves on the receiving end of most of his eccentric decisions in the first half, but they all paled into insignificance when Tom Soares ran into Tony Capaldi a good yard outside the penalty area only to see Mason point to the penalty spot! Without going into the fact that the incident took place outside the area (television pictures later confirmed this), whether Capaldi had committed a foul or not had to be very much open to debate, but Ben Watson kept his cool in the face of much gamesmanship by Kasper Schmeichel and sent the keeper the wrong way to equalise.
The second half passed with very little goalmouth incident as two poor teams showed why they were they so near the bottom of the table (I am at a loss to explain how Palace made it to the end of season play offs given their performance that night!). Far from being rejuvenated, our two strikers looked like they had a combined age of seventy seven not sixty seven!. If anything, Robbie Fowler played even worse than he did against S****horpe and made what was becoming his usual exit around the hour mark - Jimmy Floyd Hasselbaink was little better, but at least he had a few half chances, none of which he was able to convert.
The final whistle went with boos ringing out from sections of the crowd as City picked up just their sixth point from eight home matches and it had to be said that this performance was just about the worst they had given at home so far. City were now in nineteenth position just two points off the bottom three with just one win in ten league matches and a visit to fourth placed Charlton the following Saturday hardly suggested that there would be a change of fortune soon.
About a month earlier there had been a few signs that Robbie Fowler could do the sort of job for the club that Dave Jones and Peter Ridsdale had envisaged, but, for the past five or six matches his performances had been very poor and our manager finally bowed to the inevitable when he left him on the bench at Charlton and started with Steve Thompson alongside Hasselbaink. To be fair to Fowler it needs to be said that there were reports at this time that he was struggling with an injury and he would later go over to Germany to be given injections to try and repair a condition which at the time was reported as being a leg injury.
Apart from this one change, Dave Jones again stuck with the "tried and tested" for City's first visit to the Valley in twenty two years and they could have gone ahead when Hasselbaink was denied a goal against his former club by keeper Weaver. City gave as good as they got for forty five minutes, but then imploded during added time at the end of the first half as they conceded twice. There was an element of good fortune with the first goal as Reid's free kick deflected off the wall to centre back Sodje who scored easily, but it was poor defending that enabled Iwelumo to gather a long ball forward and beat Schemichel.
Although City had come back from a two goal deficit once before during the season, there was little in the second half performance to suggest that there was going to be a repeat of the televised game at Plymouth back in September. Yet again, the stats showed City having more goal attempts and efforts on target than their opponents, but that counted for little as they ended a well beaten team as Charlton added to their lead with ten minutes left when Zhi Zheng headed in another Reid free kick.
City dropped another place to twentieth and now only goal difference was keeping them out of the bottom three. Results were making Dave Jones' early season claim that he put together the club's "best ever squad" look laughable. Peter Ridsdale didn't go quite as far, but his contention that supporters would have a team to be proud of also appeared to be a hollow one at the time - although, subsequent events meant that our Chairman, if not our manager, could legitimately claim at the end of the season that he had been right all along.
There was no doubt that Dave Jones was under the greatest pressure of his two and a half year reign as manager, but it still came as a surprise to read messages on here from "in the know" posters on the Sunday evening following the Charlton match saying that Peter Ridsdale had decided that our manager would be sacked the following day. People who have used this board for any amount of time learn to take a lot of this sort of stuff with a pinch of salt normally, but stories like this one
http://tinyurl.com/62t87g
which appeared in the national press the following day, definitely made you think that this time there was something to this particular rumour -after all, where would the hacks have got this story from?
Monday came and went without any news of the reported sacking and this story from the same newspaper on the Tuesday morning confirmed the suspicion that had grown during the previous day that our manager would not be leaving
http://tinyurl.com/5qqs4b
In an acknowledgment of off field problems, there was speculation that Peter Ridsdale had been told that Dave Jones could not leave because the club could not offer to pay up his contract, but, apart from a very select few, I don't think there were many who really knew what had happened and why those stories suddenly appeared in the national press on the Monday morning. What had to be acknowledged though was that Peter Ridsdale was prepared to face supporters at this difficult time as he attended a meeting with 20 or so concerned fans.
What was emerging now were reports that Dave Jones had two games in which to save his job, but with International fixtures again causing a break in the league season, it would be a fortnight or so before it could be seen if there was any credence to these stories.
Things weren't going much better off the field as both sides prepared for the upcoming court case which had been put back a month to mid December. If the threat posed by Langston/Hammam's lawsuit had not been taken too seriously by both club and supporters back in August, it certainly was being now as the club claimed that, in effect, the law suit was stopping them trading normally because the bank was denying them access to funds they had relied on when they budgeted for the season back in the summer.
Most of what appeared in the media regarding the court case was from the club's perspective as Langston/Hammam, for whatever reason, kept a lower profile. To my mind, all of this helped create a mindset whereby Langston/Hammam were seen as the "villains of the piece" as a perception began to grow that they were seeking to send the club into administration. Langston/Hammam finally responded by issuing a statement through the solicitors Hextalls in which they sought to reassure supporters of their intentions
http://tinyurl.com/4dvnfe
However, it was hard to avoid the suspicion that the damage had already been done as far as they were concerned - to put it in simplistic terms, the case eventually went ahead with the club being very much portrayed as the goodies and Langston/Hammam as the baddies!
Another indication of how seriously the club were now viewing the situation came when board member Mike Hall resigned - Peter Ridsdale explained this decision by saying;-
"Mike is also a director of PMG, who are the club's biggest secured creditors.
We have an impending court case involving Langston and if anything went wrong and we lost the case then Mike would be in a position of a conflict of interests.
We firmly believe we will win the court case, but there is no such thing as a 100 per cent case. We have to be aware of that."
That said, the seriousness of the situation did not prevent Peter Ridsdale spending much of November touring the country and endlessly appearing in the national media publicising his book "United We Fall: Boardroom Truths About the Beautiful Game". Now, to be fair to our Chairman, he and his publishers almost certainly didn't know about the court case when the publication date was set, but, speaking for myself, I found it extremely galling at the time to hear and read Peter Ridsdale pontificating on how bleak the future of his current club might be if the court case was lost on the one hand and then him talking to all and sundry publicising a book describing one of his previous clubs' financial turmoils on the other!
It really was a grim time to be a Cardiff City fan and you were forced into looking around for small crumbs of comfort that you could feed off - although there weren't too many of them, they were there, for example;-
1. Demolition work had started on the old Leckwith Stadium athletics track - a sure sign that, despite the court case, construction of the new ground was still ongoing.
2. Kasper Schmeichel's loan spell had been extended until 1January.
3. Joe Ledley had continued his good club form with impressive displays in Wales' draws with the Republic of Ireland and Germany, but it was Chris Gunter who had really taken the eye with two excellent performances at left back - Darcy Blake and Aaron Ramsey had also done well for Wales Under 21s in their four goal victories over Bosnia and France.
4. Hopefully, the fortnight's break from league fixtures had been used to get things "back to basics" as Dave Jones sought to keep his job.
After his International performances, Chris Gunter just had to start in the home match against a schizophrenic Ipswich side who had thrashed Bristol City 6-0 in their last game to maintain their 100% home record, but remained winless on their travels. Dave Jones later claimed that the plan was always to bring Gunter back into the side around this time, but I have to say that this hardly tied in with the fact that Gunter had travelled up to Charlton to watch the game as a supporter and not a squad member - surely that offered evidence of how far Gunter had slipped down the pecking order before he got the chance through his International appearances to show what City had been missing!
If Gunter's return was no surprise, then the identity of the man who made way for him certainly was as Kevin McNaughton, one of few City players to maintain some sort of consistency so far dropped to the bench with Capaldi keeping his place at left back and Gunter slotting in on the right.
There was an impressive turn out of Ipswich fans for the lunchtime kick off and they might have been surprised to see Neil Alexander given such a warm reception by City fans considering that he had joined their club on a Bosman, but this was a reflection of the way most supporters felt about someone who it was perceived had been forced out of the club.
However, it was the other returning ex City player Alan Lee who took centre stage in the first twenty seconds when a slip by Darren Purse left him clean through on goal. Lee lobbed the ball over the oncoming Schmeichel and onto the crossbar from where the ball bounced clear - given the ways things were going at the time, you have to wonder what the consequences for the team and, in particular, our manager would have been if Lee's effort had been an inch or two lower!
Apart from a header by Tommy Miller in the dying stages which Paul Parry blocked on the line, Ipswich never really threatened after that as they showed why they were such poor travellers and City just about deserved their single goal victory. With his goal line clearance, Paul Parry would have been one of the City heroes on the day anyway, but it was his lovely, placed left foot shot from twenty yards after thirty three minutes that made the big difference on the day and the winger was about to enter a period where he would become just about the teams most important player as a change of position helped transform his and City's season.
TBC