Two games played, two games lost with no goals scored, seven conceded and, hardly surprisingly, bottom of the Championship table and with an away local derby against opponents who have dominated the fixture in recent years, Cardiff City have to view their 1-1 draw at Swansea today as a positive outcome.
While the jacks have come to Cardiff City Stadium quite often in the last fifteen years or so and won easily, it’s says so much about how we’ve faced up to the challenge of playing at Swansea since we won 1-0 there in 2011 that the only time we’ve scored and avoided defeat there before today was in a 1-0 win in 2021 which was played behind closed doors.
For forty minutes or so today, our performance could be described as the most feeble out of the half a dozen limp losses we suffered on the ground since Craig Bellamy’s late winner thirteen and a half years ago – there was absolutely nothing to commend it, apart from the fact that we, somehow, managed to stay just the one goal behind.
When the tide began to turn somewhat in the closing minutes of the first half, I found it hard to avoid the thought that it had more to do with Swansea over confidence than anything else.
Swansea representatives on Radio Wales and Sky both heavily implied that we dragged the home team down to our level by making the game a more scrappy affair after the break. While understandable to some extent, I’d say Swansea were hardly blameless when it came to their drawing a match which I’m sure they felt they should have won, but they completely lost their earlier poise, got more edgy and, consequently, their mistakes increased.
Swansea fans amused themselves in the first half with shouts of “hoof” when we resorted to some long aerial clearances as a consequence of their effective pressing, but there was not much evidence of the much vaunted “Swansea way” today. The jacks were more direct than usual and the best piece of football all afternoon came from us with the construction and execution of our first league goal of the season.
Erol Bulut made a couple of changes to the side that, in some respects, played better in losing 5-0 at Burnley last week than they did today. Two new signings came in for first league starts with Jesper Daland replacing the struggling Dimi Goutas as left centre back and Alex Robertson in central midfield for the injured Joe Ralls – there was also a first appearance from the bench for Anwar El Ghazi.
It’s happened more with Cardiff v Swansea games than the other way around, but City might just have been starting to congratulate themselves for getting through the opening minutes without conceding, when they let in yet another very poor goal in the tenth minute.
In mitigation, Swansea got lucky in the build up three times. Firstly, in trying to cut out Harry Darling’s pass intended for Ronald, Yakou Meite headed the ball in field straight to a white shirt from where the ball was worked out to left back Josh Tymon whose cross found Liam Cullen in glorious isolation ten yards out in a central position. Cullen’s intended volley was a complete miskick which fell perfectly for Ronald whose well struck effort was stopped by Ethan Horvarth, but the ball dropped perfectly for Cullen who easily scored his third goal in four appearances in the derby from six yards out.
I thought Daland was one of the plus points to be taken from today’s match, he has an assurance to him that bodes well for how we want to play if we can only get a bit of confidence into the team – sometimes, he came over as a bit too assured, but, in an increasingly frantic fixture, he came through a testing derby on his debut with no major traumas in that department.
With one exception, Daland also defended well, but when I watched the goal back, it looked like he was the one who had lost Cullen as the cross came in.
You had to feel for Horvarth though. He was goaded from first minute to last by Swansea fans all too eager to remind him of his catastrophic error last week and it was always going to be a huge test for him in what would have been a high pressure game anyway. It was typical of the way things are going for Horvarth that his best moment of the game gave him no reward as his fine save only delayed the goal for a couple of seconds.
Unfortunately, although he did not concede again, Horvarth did not inspire confidence. For a lot of the time he still looked like an accident waiting to happen with the ball at his feet and in a game where he was tested more than normal in this department, his handling of crosses was uncertain.
Much has been said in the last year or so about how negative we’ve been when beginning games under Erol Bulut, but I’m not sure that applies this season as we started off positively against Sunderland, were taking the game to Burnley before Horvarth’s horror moment and while we were hardly piling forward here, we hadn’t been under too much pressure before Swansea scored.
You get the feeling that Bulut will be looking at these early goals being conceded though and he’s surely going to think this can’t go on, so a reversion to type will soon follow, but, for now, we’ve got two hundred and seventy minutes of league action behind us and we’ve been trailing for all but forty five of them.
Maybe that might explain why our response to going behind was such a timid one, confidence must be low after the sort of start we’ve made and our poor finish to last season can’t be helping in that regard either.
Instead of going looking for an equaliser, City stood off Swansea as if they were in awe of the team that used to compare themselves with Barcelona and not be joking about it. Our pressing became non existent and, as far as any attacking was concerned, we looked like Cheltenham must have last season after failing to score in their first eleven league games!
I can only guess that City were thinking let’s just stay in the game at 1-0 down and hope that, somehow, something will turn up later.
As is so often the case, our problems started in midfield, Manolis Siopis had one of those afternoons where he was always a little late in arriving and the ball had gone by the time he did, Aaron Ramsey again played ninety minutes, but I can’t understand why because he’s struggling so far this season (you know he’s going to get injured as well if Bulut keeps on doing this) and while Robertson looked neat on the ball, he had little impact when Swansea were in possession.
The strange thing is that for all of Swansea’s complete domination of the game in the half an hour or so after they scored, I can’t remember them coming that close to getting a second.
On this evidence, this is not one of the strongest jacks teams of recent years and their limitations were exposed somewhat in the second half, but it says how abject City were that the home side were clearly so much better than us for ninety per cent of the first period.
The five minutes before the break offered some hope though. WIlfried Kanga only touched the ball twice in the first twenty five minutes and he was getting nowhere until he combined with Chris Willock and shot about a yard wide from the edge of the penalty area. Another effort shortly afterwards was not as convincing, but at least home goalkeeper Lawrence Vigouroux was finally given something to do.
If City were not making things hard enough for themselves, they also had to endure a very poor showing from referee Oliver Langford who was your archetypal “homer” throughout. Not for the first time in their home derby game, Swansea were given full latitude by a referee to welcome City to proceedings with late challenges and fouls that drew no card from the official – Harry Darling, a persistent offender in this respect since he joined the jacks from MK Dons, was at it all game with the ironic thing being that when Langford eventually showed him a yellow card in the tenth minute of added time, he didn’t seem to do much wrong as Perry Ng took retribution for a poor tackle on him by Darling in the opening minutes with a niggling flick and then a dramatic fall aimed at getting the Swansea man a red card. Ng was, rightly, booked, as was Rubin Colwill apparently..
Langford continued to favour Swansea through the second half and maybe there was a sense of injustice behind City’s gradual improvement – I say gradual, but I should really qualify that with one or two verys!
The game had changed, but it was more to do with the jacks losing their way. I’d read quite a bit about the damage the home wingers Ronald and Eom Ji Sung would cause us, but they were both increasingly wasteful with the latter eventually being withdrawn and their patchy play epitomised why it was becoming clear that there was a way back into the game for City if they could only create something resembling a chance for themselves.
Maybe it was the thought that it was a more even game now that made Bulut reluctant to make the substitutions that were clearly needed. Colwill did come on for Robertson just before the hour mark, but that was the only change made until the game was well into its final quarter.
Colwill slotted into Ramsey’s position and the Welsh captain dropped into the deeper role that has been occupied by Robertson.
Colwill made City look a bit more lively and a cross of his flew across the face of the Swansea goal with no City player making the sort of run which would have left them with a simple header to equalise, while Ramsey was slightly more effective in his new position. However, it was only when Ollie Tanner came on for Meite and then Callum Robinson and El Ghazi replaced Kanga and Willock that City began to build up a head of attacking steam as a few corners were forced which came to nothing.
To be honest, City weren’t doing much to suggest an equaliser was coming, but then, from somewhere, they conjured a really high quality goal just as the match was entering its last ten minutes.
It started with Calum Chambers finding Colwill who played a beautifully weighted ball down the right which gave Tanner the chance to go at Tymon and he made himself a yard to cut back an intelligent, low cross. The intelligence did not stop there either as Robinson created space for himself by not following the Swansea centre backs towards goal and so he was perfectly positioned to meet the cross with a first time shot into the corner from eighteen yards.
After having made scoring look almost impossible for two hundred and sixty minutes of league action, City had come up with something so effective and simple that you wondered why they’d struggled so much before that.
The drama was added to when Tanner picked up a nasty looking cut in the celebrations following the goal when a hoarding fell on his leg. City questioned Swansea’s security arrangements after the game, but it seemed that the accident would never have happened if some supporters hadn’t decided to climb over another set of barriers to try to join in with the team’s celebrations.
Within seconds of the restart, a Swansea mistake presented City with a chance to go ahead, but the chance really needed to fall to someone other than Siopis whose daisy cutter of a shot was saved with few problems by Vigouroux.
Both sides looked for a winner after that, but, although one or two decent crossing positions for either side were worked, nothing came of them and the most noteworthy incident saw Erol Bulut red carded after holding on to the ball following another wrong decision by the officials as a throw in was awarded to Swansea which clearly should have gone to us. The whole thing became a bit stupid really as Bulut argued with Swansea players Jay Fulton and Kyle Naughton and, after consulting fourth official Keith Stroud, the City manager was ordered to leave the dug out – it seemed like an over reaction by an official who’d had a poor afternoon.
So, City have broken both their points and goal duck. In truth, there was still lots to be concerned about in our performance, but the pressure has lifted a little by getting something out of a game none of the pundits gave us a chance in. For example, all three of the journalists in a Wales Online article had City losing without scoring a goal, while it was nice to see the smug presenter who barely has a good word to say about us on the Second Tier podcast lose out on his “banker” selection of a home win!