Huddersfield, the Hadron Collider and Miranda.

Huddersfield 0 Cardiff 0

I start with a history lesson:

Cardiff City beat Reading 2-1 on November the 21^st, and in the succeeding 14 games we have only won once, against struggling Fulham. In the meantime Reading came back to beat us at home in the FA Cup in January. I think that fate allowed that to happen just to show us how far we had tumbled.

Teams who are dancing close to the grave of relegation, like Brighton and Rotherham, held us to draws at home and do not forget both had more possession than us.

Now we have people getting out the bunting and dancing in the streets because we have drawn the last four matches. After the last two draws people have sent their footmen to fetch the aged bottles of Brains SA from the cellars in celebration. No wonder Russell Slade compares us to Real Madrid. 4 draws eh?

Those bottles of Brains beer put away for a special occasion - like City drawing two matches.

 

I didn’t see the Blackburn draw when the Trollope effect and the talented Kennedy powered us forward but possession in that match was only 50/50 anyways. Today, against Huddersfield, we only had the ball 39% of the time. Possession has been grim since Mister Slade donned his extra lkarge tracksuit and took to the touchlines - and this from a team full of ball players.

At the start of the season the bookies looked over our squad and ticked the box marked ‘favourites for automatic promotion.’ Now the manager’s ambition is for us to finish in the top half of the table. Yet we may not get high enough up the table to press our noses against the window of the top 6 to look in at the party we didn’t get invited to.

A mediocre team in a mediocre championship.

Despite being bored and ground down by the pitiful displays from Cardiff over the last couple of months I was dreaming of us knocking together the five wins that would propel us back up the table like a Saturn V rocket. I confess I still have that dream, because it remains possible.

Some teams presently in the top 6 will plummet before your missus starts on about this year’s Summer holiday. The championship is always a merry go around across the mad Easter period. Some teams will get momentum and others will collapse. It has always been so.

But that record of a single win in 14 championship matches tells me all I need to know. Solskjaer and Slade were the wrong choices. I backed Solskjaer and was prepared to give Slade a chance but this season will be the worst I have suffered at Cardiff City – ever.

Yes, in the last thirty years we have suffered the ignominy of relegation, we have come close to administration, and we have been toe curlingly disappointing. But never before have we started the season as sure fire winners boasting the best squad in the championship. Even Malky’s Championship topping promotion team was not talked about as favourites at the outset. Nor Dave Jones plucky group of the injured, the lame and the out of favour guns for hire he moulded into a team that came close to winning the play offs.

Dave Jones squad of the injured, old and rejects

 

Dave Jones could have put this squad into the play offs - honest, it is not a gratuitous picture of girls bottoms to cheer up suicidal Cardiff City supporters.

 

This is amongst the most talented squad of footballers I have ever seen here in many years.

It is like paying to see a Bond movie and end up watching Miranda or booking Raymond Blanc’s restaurant and being served cold pie and soggy chips. Actually both those disappointments would be just about bearable compared to the season thus far.

Maybe if Solskjaer had the benefit of Trollope, or someone like him, then the Norwegian would still be here and we would be contenders.

I do feel we are getting better, though surely it couldn’t have become any worse, could it? I do give Slade the credit for bringing in the two Everton youngsters along with the lively Doyle. My heart goes out to the guy. If someone asked me to run the Hadron Collider I would end up looking as distraught as him. “Honest guys, I have never run a Hadron Collider before, don’t you need someone who can do the job? It would be like anyone from the lower leagues trying to manage a talented group of players in one of the toughest leagues in the world. Well ok then, if you think so.”

The Hadron Collider, Russell Slade's next job

 

I still dream of those elusive ‘five back to back’ wins Russell Slade talks about, starting against Malky’s Wigan, but the despair is overwhelming.

It has been a shit season, and I see no reason to feel that next season will be any better.

If by May we are not in the top 8 then Slade must go. We must not make the same generous mistake we made with Solskjaer and give Mister Slade an opportunity to prove himself. We need to get someone in who knows the championship and understands success and give him a Summer to build his squad.

Those that claimed they would be happy to see Cardiff play in Blue in the lower leagues have come close to getting their wish.

 

Please Cardiff, please, prove me wrong, ‘just 5 back to back wins’ against Wigan, Wolves, Rotherham, Charlton and Brentford and then we can see where we  are in the league. Surely it won’t be 17^th!

 

 

 

 

The Russell Slade table of Doom

The Russell Slade table of Doom As of 10 February 2015
 

Team	From	To	Record
			G	W	D	L	Win %
Notts Co (caretaker)	15-Sep-94	12-Jan-95	23	6	5	12	26.1
Shef Und (caretaker)	02-Mar-98	09-Mar-98	2	0	1	1	0
Shef Und (caretaker)	23-Nov-99	02-Dec-99	2	0	1	1	0
Scarborough	15-Nov-01	28-May-04	133	50	41	42	37.6
Grimsby Town	28-May-04	31-May-06	105	41	30	34	39.1
Yeovil Town	07-Jun-06	16-Feb-09	137	49	32	56	35.8
Brighton & Hove	06-Mar-09	01-Nov-09	32	9	7	16	28.1
Leyton Orient	05-Apr-10	24-Sep-14	242	103	61	78	42.6
Cardiff City	06-Oct-14	Present	21	7	5	9	33.3
Total			697	265	183	249	38

Russell Slade has managed 9 clubs with varying degrees of incompetence. Only once has he won more than 40% of matches and that was with Orient, the team ready to sack him before Cardiff employed him.

In fact, unbelievably, out of the 9 clubs we offer his fifth best win statistics!

He seems a nice enough guy, maybe if given until the end of the season, or more likely till the end of next season he might learn the game. There again …

Obviously the Cardiff board have a big headache this far into the season. If he were sacked now we could go four or more games without a full time manager –but would that be worse? Then there would be a short period for the new appointment to settle in.

So a gamble.

But to keep Russell Slade risks losing everything and being relegated.

I know which risk I would find most acceptable.

http://cardiffcityfan.blogspot.co.uk/

Brighton, a smelly plug, maligning headless chickens, why Bellamy and Dave Jones need to be handed the poisoned chalice

Brighton are a shit team. No disrespect intended. They just are. They sit above the three teams in the relegation zone like a smelly plug.

And yet they enjoy over 60% of the possession when playing Cardiff City. Cardiff, the team the bookies made favourites to go straight back up to the premier league.

Why?

Because Cardiff have no idea. No idea what so ever. What? Eh? They know how to play the long ball? Nope! That’s why we cannot keep possession. We do not know how to play the long ball. Dave Jones used the long ball, amongst other tactics, by utilising the amazing skills of Jay Bothroyd to hold the ball up and play his colleagues into space. But now no one knows what to do when the ball is hoofed forwards. I cannot think of a metaphor that doesn't malign headless chickens.

This is why every team that comes to the Cardiff city stadium has more space in the middle of the park than they would find on Lavernock beach in December.

Woeful. Pitiful. Grim. I have run out of words to describe City under Russell Slade.

I, like every fair minded city fan came to view Russell Slade as incompetent at this level. Yet we held our collective breaths through the January transfer window while we saw HIS players and HIS team play HIS way. Result? Even worse than before.

To cede 60%, and at times 65% of possession, to no hopers like Brighton says it all.

Fans lash out at Whitts and Gunnarson not realising that if you do not have a system in midfield then even the greatest players in the world will look incompetent. No one in a blue shirt knows what to do or what anyone around them is supposed to do.

We are 6 points from the relegation sink hole. The tide is rising. It has reached our waist and soon it will be neck high.

Slade must go and he must go right now. We need a professional, experienced manager. Mister Tan are you listening? We have tried managers who are inexperienced at this level and all have fallen flat on their backsides.

As for who, well that’s a question it will take a wiser person than me to answer. I cannot see anyone around at the moment. Craig Bellamy under Dave Jones might be as good a team as can be found.

Its about survival.

And to think Neil Lennon actually wanted the job.