Apart from the odd League Cup tie, Cardiff City and Portsmouth meet up for the first time in well over twelve years tomorrow. The last time the teams met with league points at stake was in January 2012 when a late goal by Craig Conway proved decisive in a match we had trailed in by 2-1 – Kenny Miller and Mark Hudson scored our other goals and future City player Greg Halford got one of Portsmouth’s.
Both teams will be coming off big wins, ours was big in terms of the margin involved, but I saw it argued on a podcast that Pompey’s come from behind 2-1 win at QPR (a defeat which sent the London club to the bottom of the table) was the Championship’s most significant of the weekend.
I can understand that sentiment, Portsmouth had coped pretty well with a very tough start to the season in terms of being competitive, but it left them without a win and a 6-1 loss at Stoke in what was supposed to the the first of a run of “easier” fixtures left them in danger of becoming cut adrift with us at the bottom of the table even at this early stage of the season.
As it is, both of us are still in the bottom three, but with a feeling that things are improving. and, if there is a winner tomorrow, they will start thinking in terms of climbing towards mid table.
From a City perspective, the feelgood factor generated by the manner of our win, rather than the win itself, would dissipate completely with a defeat and there have been more than enough dismal defeats at Cardiff City Stadium in recent years for me not to rule that outcome out. However, it makes a pleasant change to be feeling that defeat is unlikely in our next match, even though I wouldn’t rule out a draw for a Pompey side that has a 3-3 at Leeds and a 2-2 at Middlesbrough in their away record to add to Saturday’s win.
Here’s the usual seven questions going back to the 60s on our next opponents.
60s. Although you may have thought it so, there appears to be no link between this full back and the current day Portsmouth side. A Londoner, who started off at one of the capital’s biggest clubs, the one league match he played for them was the only one of his career that he did not play in Portsmouth colours. Signing for Pompey upon his release by his first club, he played ninety one times in the league over the next three seasons with just one win to show from his five encounters with Cardiff. When he left Pompey as the decade was coming to an end, it was to play in a country that was something of a pariah at the time and he didn’t stay there long before he returned to England to play for a side that were thought to be a very unlikely second tier outfit at that time. However, an injury meant that he never played for his new team and he left the game at the age of twenty four, can you name him?
70s. This forward spent the large majority of a long career wearing kits that featured unusual colours and/or unusual designs, something which, to a degree, epitomised a career that could not be called normal. His form as a teenager for a team with a pretty big reputation that are currently propping up their league led to a big money move to London and he made an immediate impact by scoring on his debut at one of the most iconic grounds in the country. However it seems that he succumbed to the sort of temptations a young, single lad with a lucrative job is always likely to fall prey to. Injuries didn’t help either, but the truth was probably that he was never as good as his early performances suggested he would be. When he signed for Portsmouth, it was at a time when they had abandoned their traditional kit and he was part of an expensive and under achieving squad for the two years he was with them. His next move saw him wearing unusual colours again at a ground that you would have thought would be full of conifers. He was loaned to a team in Australia for a while and then returned to the capital for a while to wear a very normal kit for a team that were solidly second tier at that time. Next up was a move to America where he scored goals at a rate never to be repeated in his career. Maybe, it was this scoring form which tempted the “other” team in the city where he had started his career to sign him, but the goals never came at any great rate and he was more out of the team than in it the next two seasons before he became involved with prickly plants for a short while and then dropped into non league to play in a kit that was the same as the one he wore when appearing for the team where he attracted most publicity – who is he?
80s. Crooner with vague Cardiff City connection appears in welsh house in China! (5,6)
90s. Avian summer visitor feeling a bit nippy by the sound of it!
00s. Although he denied it, which forty four times capped member of Portsmouth’s 2008 FA Cup Final team was reportedly earning £80,000 per week sixteen years ago?
10s. Which member of the last Portsmouth side to play us in a league game signed for another team a few months later and is still with them today?
20s. Flying squad member holidays on south coast perhaps!
Answers to follow: