Gut churning and pitiful, Solskjaer might as well be at day one

No conviction, no spirit, no fight, no idea and no tactics.

Narrow attacks without movement.

Incompetent passing.

Second class to a team who are candidates for relegation.

Conceding 3 goals to a team that think it’s Christmas if they score one.

City had nearly all the possession (64%) but are totally clueless.

So called fans who prefer to indulge themselves with songs about the colour of the shirt and owner than lifting the players. The twelfth man? More a hindrance.

Palace closed quickly with hunger on everything: tackles, loose balls and passes. They won’t set the world alight but they have pride and commitment and sometimes in sport that counts for everything.

I am not sure some of the city players wanted to get their shirts dirty.

This was horrible.

With Fulham winning away Cardiff may well not just drop out of the bottom of the league but finish up bottom. 

I supported the idea of Solskjaer taking over from Malky but it hasn’t worked out. He still has not got a team, a pattern or a style of play. Maybe all three are linked. He is now in his third month of management at city and it might as well be day one. 

Is it too much to ask some of the players to attack a match as if it is going to be their last? 

From here to the end of the season is going to be miserable, gut churning and pitiful unless we win away at Southampton Sunderland or Newcastle. The misery of the city fans compounded by the us not giving up hope until we see the Championship fixture list for 2014/15. That will hurt.

A quizz for the manager of Cardiff city ahead of the Palace match

So why are Cardiff conceding so many goals?

 

Please play MacNaughton at right back.

I mean when MacNaughton was at right back we were solid on that side and went onto win the Championship.

Please play MacNaughton at right back.

I can remember MacNaughton winning player of the year at Cardiff city and helping us to win so many games, so why are losing so many now? Who is the guy who isn’t playing?

Please play MacNaughton at right back.

It is difficult to put your finger on the difference.  I mean even under Malky a certain player was dropped once we reached the premiership, a player who would have given us solidity.

Please play MacNaughton at right back.

Ok so Fabio gets forward but then so does MacNaughton. Fabio can assist a right flank attack , so can MacNaughton

Please play MacNaughton at right back.

Why do we get pressed down the opposition’s left wing? What on earth can be the weakness there? What is it that opposing managers see as a weakness there?

Please play MacNaughton at right back.

I reckon we need a guy with grey hair on that side of the defence, but who could we select? There is a name on the tip of my tongue

Please play MacNaughton at right back.

I am thinking of someone, a player left out of the side since we hit the premiership, who was brought back for the Arsenal away match and played like a demon.

Please play MacNaughton at right back.

Yes I know Fabio is gifted, yes he gets forward, yes he can take on players but so can McNaughton

Please play MacNaughton at right back.

For the home match against Palace my advice to Solskjaer is to think about who is going to play at right back.  Who is the most solid, dependable defender we have, a guy who can get forward when he should not when he wants? I wish I could think of someone.

Please play MacNaughton at right back.

Tibetan monks, 3 ‘lucky goals’, idiot commentators and drawing with West Brom

More from the ‘bitter and twisted’ …

West Brom’s first goal is a fluke. A lopping, mindless, over the shoulder cross that manages to loop over Marshall while the crowd are still taking their seats and checking the program notes.

Their second is an attempted cross which deflects off a Cardiff player over the defence and somehow lands at a West Brom attackers feet. Matej Vydra gains the easiest ‘assist’ since a dad rolled the ball to the feet of his two year old son to stumble over the line.

the kid who might have started the fight back

With only ten minutes on the clock, not only did Cardiff look dead  and buried but the mourners were polishing off the dried up sandwiches, shaking their heads and saying he weren’t such a bad old sod.

Then Cardiff woke up, the way a teenager might be dragged from his cozy bed at eleven in the morning. Reluctantly and slowly the wheels were refitted to the team in red and the battering of the Baggies goals recommenced.

Mutch scored a goal straight out of the Brazilian handbook of the 1970s. Thirty five yards out, with so much time a Tibetan monk would have looked rushed, he lined up a sublime curling shot out of the reach of the England international goalkeeper Ben Foster. A wonder goal that the tv commentator perceptively described as the third lucky goal of the match. Twat.

Solskjaer performed his usual touch of creating further anxiety in Cardiff supporters, who are already beyond the help of any therapist, by taking off a defender and putting on an out and out striker (Zaha for the Fabio). Surely too early boss?

 

The onslaught began. The meters once showing West Brom with nearly all the possession seesawed the other way. Cardiff not only had the ball but seemed to have acquired composure. Caulker puts away a header that will add another million to his value when the season finishes.

Two all, with Cardiff dominating play with a nonstop attack. City supporters know just one thing: West Brom will score in the last minute of injury time. As sure as eggs are, well, a possible carrier of salmonella.

Yep.

In the 94th minute Bifouma Koulossa, (that isn’t a typo or an unfortunate collection of scrabble letters), scores the expected last ditch goal to crush the souls of the Bluebirds. Just as we knew, just as we always expected. So we are defeated by two jammy goals and one scored with the last kick

But this is football. 

The referee has the whistle in his mouth, city attack, the ball goes into the penalty area and, take your hands off your eyes, Daehli scores a goal that might, whisper it quietly, just might, keep us up.

So before you can say how the fucking hell did Crystal palace beat Chelsea to get a nostril above the water line, Cardiff find themselves 3 points behind West Brom and move up to third from bottom. If we get three more wins I reckon we could be safe, it might even take two.

Get your quack to check your heart and ready yourself for the must win Crystal Palace match.

The Bitter and Twisted Cardiff Fans

our number

The Bitter and Twisted

The new club badge

Liverpool supporters love describing their rivals across the part as ‘bitter and twisted’. If you spent more than ten mind numbing minutes in the company of an Everton supporter you would know why.

Every ungiven penalty, every own goal, every game against Liverpool, all the biased reffing. It goes on and on until it reaches how Everton were the best side in England in the 1980s at the very same time English teams were banned from Europe - following the antics of you know which team.

I now have complete sympathy for the rancorous Everton fans. With the premiership curtain about to fall on Cardiff City, may be for a long time to come, I am officially bitter and twisted.

Last night Swansea played Arsenal and drew. Forgive me. They played an Arsenal side depleted of Ramsey, Özil, Wiltshire and Walcott. No such luck for us. The Arsenal midfield trio played such scintillating football at the Cardiff City Stadium we almost felt honoured to be beaten by them.  Cut the almost, I would pay good money to watch the sublime trio of Ramsey, Özil, Wiltshire interplay, cut back and fore across the field carrying a ball connected to their feet as if by an elastic band. Maybe the nearest I will get to watching Barcelona.

Why can’t Cardiff play against an Arsenal B team?

Swansea equalise with a ball that bounces off the keeper’s feet rebounds off Flamani and rolls into the goal. Two deflections. When will Cardiff get one deflection or one own goal?

Penalties! Cardiff remain the only side not to be awarded a penalty this season. What is that about? When Cardiff played at Anfield Skirtle took less than ten minutes to realise the ref was not going to give city a penalty. Thereafter he spent every corner and free kick wrestling Cardiff players to the ground. Every corner was a cast iron penalty, not one was given.

Everton, of the bitter and twisted fans fame, beat us with two impossibly fluky goals. One deflection and the other a sliced shot that somehow span into the only area of the goal where there  wasn’t a Cardiff player - and it was pretty much the last kick of the match.

Someone up there has got it in for us.

You’d think Solskjaer is due a mammoth amount of good fortune as a balance against the iniquities of the season. Well good, let them start at West Brom on Saturday. I want one deflected goal, one own goal and a goal scored in the final minute.

Liverpool and Cardiff and both breaking records

Ok. So we gave it a go. A go against the in form side in the league.  Against the team that is scoring goals so freely even Liverpool supporters are left bewildered and records harking back to the Shankley era are broken.

Mutch on his way to a hat trick ..... well, ok, he didnt get his third goal

Twice ahead in the first half Cardiff matched the premiership best for 45 minutes.

Liverpool scoring is about as reliable as City’s bad luck. Their third goal came about when Cardiff were left to defend with two of their biggest players forced off the pitch, both having had treatment. Could only happen to Cardiff. I cannot think of any game I have watched in the last three hundred years where a team had to defend a corner under such conditions. Cardiff break records, it is just they are not the ones teams want. A season in the premiership without a penalty for example.

Liverpool kept taking the lead as reliably as a German side winning a game on penalties.

Then the rout. The immaculate passing, the incisive one twos and suddenly Liverpool have added another three.

At 5 -2 it looked all over. Well all over to anyone but Solskjaer.

The Cardiff manager told the fat lady to get back in the dressing room, there won’t  be any singing just yet as he  threw the kitchen sink onto the field. Every forward at his disposal was chucked into the line-up. He even took the gamblers risk of leaving Fabio on the pitch to tempt a ref’s red card, simply because of the hot headed defender’s amazing attacking abilities. The Norwegian go t it right. Fabio showed what he can do in attack, unlike Kenwynne Jones, and when Mutch scored City’s third there was a heady air of possibilities. 

Could we get a fourth.

It was non stop attack from the red shirted blue birds, with Liverpool relying on the rare break out. Of course when you have Suarez and Sturridge leading your counter attacks you only need a few options and you score … and they did. 6-3.

If Cardiff play their final matches as they have done against Spurs, Everton and Liverpool, two top, top sides as Malky would put it, then we are going to get points. 

Elsewhere the teams around us had the courtesy to lose, thank you for that, leaving the table exactly where it was at the start of the day. 

So West Brom, Palace, Sunderland and Stoke. Can we ask for 9 points and safety?

Cardiff fans can you concentrate on lifting the team and the players? Let’s leave shirt colours and Tan songs until after the season is over and we are safe.

Deflections, mishit shots and going for gold when a point was enough

Everton 2 Cardiff 1

ok, our goal wasn't clean either

I didn’t expect Cardiff to get points from this game, who did? But we were drawing 1-1 until the 93rd minute of the game. Just 60 seconds left. Just 60 long seconds, a lifetime of anxiety. So when the Gods see you down they give you a good kicking.

We lost to two scrappy goals, a deflection taking it out of Marshall’s reach for their first and a mishit shot from Coleman that span and twisted over everyone.

When will Cardiff get a deflected goal? Or a mishit goal? Any goal that comes from good fortune? Ok I know the answer to that. We won't, just like we are going to go a season in the Premiership without being awarded a penalty.

Even West Brom win. It pushes Swansea into the mire at the foot of the table. Yet it would have been better for us if the Swans had got a result here and kept West Brom at our level.

Solskjaer is mister tinkerer. He changes the entire formation within the first twenty minutes, swapping full backs and it works. The players swap and effortlessly drop into their new positions. Kudos to the players and coaches.

But with a point as precious to us as a Premiership win to some other clubs surely when we are drawing we do not swap a fullback for an out and out striker? But we did and it did actually put Everton under pressure in the last few minutes before they fluked their winner. Had we not gone for the win would we be driving home with a point in the bag? Who knows?

I don’t see us getting much from Liverpool next week either. But we are going to play all the teams around us in the next few weeks, that is when winning games will keep us up. Please don’t let us need a draw against Chelsea on our last day.