Originally Posted by
the other bob wilson
Possibly. On the one hand, Swansea's continued domination of the Welsh Youth Cup suggests that this may be the case, but I think on balance I'd come down on the side of saying the answer to your question is no.
Others closer to what goes on at the younger levels in our Academy could answer this better, but my impression is that they compete with the jacks on an equal footing and, in fact, beat them regularly. Also, I read on the club website on a fairly regular basis how age group Cardiff sides are beating sides with category one Academys and how they go over to mainland Europe and and beat some big name team or another. We shouldn't forget as well that, although they were beaten by the jacks in the Welsh Youth Cup yet again, our under 18s are coming off what I would regard as our most successful season at that level since we gained Academy status.
For me, all of this suggests an endorsement of the line I've argued for a few years now. We are a club that has a major problem turning promising seventeen and eighteen year olds into first team footballers - the Academy may have age group teams that can be called successful at various levels within it, but it is failing at what has to surely be its prime function.
There is another way of looking at it though and that is that Cardiff City have had a succession of men in charge since Malky Mackay who have been completely unwilling to pick young players in the first team. To be fair to Ole, he did show a lot of faith in Declan John and Paul Trollope wasn't in charge long enough for anyone to work out what his attitude towards young players was. Russell Slade was simply the worst manager I've seen at Cardiff in terms of youth development and Neil Warnock's record in that department marks him out as not being that much better.
Does the absence of young locally produced players in our first team mean our Academy is not producing youngsters who are good enough? It gives those who say our dreadful record in the past decade in terms of home grown first team players is solely down to them not being good enough an easy excuse for not digging deeper for reasons to explain it. However, with us now in the same position as the jacks were twelve months ago, I would argue that the chances of Connor Roberts, Dan James and Joe Rodon play as much first team football next season at Cardiff if they were with us and were a year younger as they have done at Swansea this time around would be nil under this manager.
Paul Trollope is the interesting one when it comes to young players and first team selection because he was appointed with the brief of getting more Academy youngsters into the first team. Now, to me, this suggests that our owner and the Club Board were aware of our wretched record in that department and wanted to do something about it, but it seems that resolve was not strong enough to survive eleven bad league results for the first team and we've heard nothing about what was described as "the Cardiff way" since then.
If I were Vincent Tan, Mehmet Dalman or Ken Choo and I got to hear that, once again, a twenty five year old had won the club's Young Player of the Year award on the back of yet another season that had seen no local Academy products play any meaningful first team football, I would be demanding to know why. However, all of the signs are that, having paid lip service to this problem for a month or two three years ago, we're happy enough to let a system that is, manifestly, not working rumble on as it has done for nearly a decade now.
This, for me, is an example of the "plucky little Cardiff City" mentality which I find both puzzling and concerning because it fails to recognise what we are and what we could be for seven or eight years now, we have not had enough people with the requisite understanding of the game of football in positions of power at the club. I accept that Messrs Dalman and Choo are good on the financial administration side of things and offer an improvement on some who have been in their position over the period of time I'm talking about and that in Neil Warnock we have someone who will not back down when representing the game in a football v finance argument as some in his position may have done in the past, but, with our manager, understandably from his perspective, only interested in the short term, there is a lack of a "plan" at the club.
With a new midfield required, the club still lacking a reliable goalscorer and important players now into their thirties, I think I'm right in saying most fans would accept that we're at a stage where the team needs to be rebuilt to an extent, but do any of us have a clue as to how Vincent Tan will react? Will the approach be more of the same sort of thing we've seen since Russell Slade's appointment or will there be a recognition that next season probably represents our best chance of getting back into the Premier League for the foreseeable future and the level of spending that you would associate with most sides that get relegated? Although the description I used in my blog piece entails far more than just a failure to spend big in the transfer market, the next few weeks will provide the answer as to whether we are going to continue on as "plucky little Cardiff City" in the Championship as well as the Premier League.
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