Reply With QuoteAgree with this. There hasn’t been much confidence in posters on here all season. Some are writing off the club for next season already.Originally Posted by The Lone Gunman
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It depends what you see as failure, Dave.
In 2002 when we returned to the Championship after so many years of utter garbage, I said that 5 years with these big clubs in the Championship was as much as I could expect. Then we were certainly "little Cardiff City". Looking thorugh the list of our opponents, so many seemed so much bigger than us.
But snce then we have never been out of the Championship, have been to Wembley 4 times, and have been promoted twice, albeit relegated twice in the first season.
For me the last 17 seasons have been largely very very enjoyable. Like many others I feel the rebrand is behind us. The club is in good shape. At the turn of the century if you has offered me this, I would have said you were bonkers.
You are, and always have been, by nature a dissenter. I enjoy an argument, but who could really say that Cardiff City has not been a good club to support since 2002?
So I am looking forward to next season. None of us knows what is going to happen, but whatever it is will be interesting, from our relatively new position as a respected top six Championship club.
Agree with this. There hasn’t been much confidence in posters on here all season. Some are writing off the club for next season already.
Really? Im expecting top 6 minimum.
I think we will be promoted again.
There hasnt been confidence on the messageboards. I thought wed go down but this hasnt gone to the stands on match days. The players have been backed by a vocal crowd.
But aren't the majority of promoted clubs Championship clubs until at least their second season? Brighton last year finished 15th with the same number of wins we've managed this year, one fewer away win and with a squad you'd describe as Championship. The one difference between our results really, comparing their successful season last year to our limited season this year, is that they beat a "big 6" side twice.
Last year Brighton, Huddersfield and Newcastle were all Championship sides; Burnley, Boro and Hull the year before; Bournemouth and Norwich before that.... Apart from this year where Wolves, in conjunction with a super-agent, and Fulham, moreso a Premier League mess than championship club, I don't think the majority come up ready to compete as a Premier League side.
We should have signed a right back and not a left back.
Saying that Pelts has played as well as ive ever seen him towards the end of the season.
Swansea went from Division '4' to the Premier league training on a university playing field. All these layers of staff and impressive facilities at the Vale are just fur coat and no knickers..
Yet Leeds, Sheffield United, Aston Villa, Nottingham Forest, WBA, Derby, Sheff Wed, etc., are all arguably 'bigger' than Cardiff City, yet this season played in a Division below. More than ever, it seems that income from gate receipts is not exclusively influencing squad strength..
Paul, I think Mark Harris was returned to us last week, a bit early as he obviously didn't do too well there.
To be fair to the fans ,it was the club and manager who said the promotion had come an year too early and they were right.
The club really seem to struggle with player recruitment.
It wasn't an inferiority complex, it was a sensible judgement , based on other teams squads and set ups .
I've always thought that our ability to get players to come to Cardiff was tougher than most when facing competion from London, Midlands and North West areas some of whom you list.
As a player why take a short term transfer, uproot your family for a club that may fall quickly ,that leaves us picking at the crumbs when it comes to available players.
The solution is a fiver year plan too broaden our European scouting , look at depth the lower leagues , build a decent academy , once we have that in place ,optimism will turn into true belief and confidence in our ability to stay up .
Lastly, of the list of clubs you show in my humble view only Wolves will stay in the long term ,its down to cash ??
Yeah, it’s not the be all and all. Reckon our fans are realists these days. Maybe the PL isn’t all that?
The board is littered with doom and gloom at times , and your right the crowds have been great this year .
Think its best not to measure the fans verall mood by this board standards , as it contains a lot of (woe is me ) .
I think expectations were low(ish), and fans were determined to enjoy the ride whatever happened, due to several aspects of our recent history.
Firstly, very few of us expected to get promoted a season after we looked like we'd be dropping to League 1. For that alone many fans, me included, were very happy to go along with whatever Neil wanted, since the minor miracle of our promotion was largely down to him.
Secondly, many fans, again me included, were wary of making big name signings, partly for fear of upsetting the spirit that the team had shown during our promotion season and partly because the tactic of throwing money at the problem didn't work very well during our last spell in the PL . Realistically, without quite a few signings we weren't likely to survive and a lot of us saw that as the lesser of two evils.
Thirdly, after the rebrand fiasco, Warnock's tenure saw the club coming together in a way that seemed hardly possible a season or two before. Consequently there was a huge amount of good will towards Neil and indeed the club as a whole, irrespective of how well we did on the field.
You can't understand the fans' fatalism this season unless you view it in this context.
So, having read some of the replies in this thread, I presume that many supporters of a club that can average 31,500 in the Premier League in a relegation season are perfectly happy for us to carry on as "plucky little Cardiff City"?
Is this true? am i reading this right? Warwiks son is Rhys agent?
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/d...nock-v8wp63kgl
I can't find that he is. But if, someone must have had the largest of brainfarts! In one of the clubs most important matches, they go out and do this?If true, he should be sacked just for that, let alone the "mackay debacle"..
****in hell mate..
Not necessarily. Many of us feel we owed Warnock and the club one. That doesn't mean in perpetuity.
I think Warnock stating almost every week that we were indeed "plucky little Cardiff", puching above our weight was totally the wrong attitude. Most of the fans just seemed to accept we would be relegated and they should just enjoy the ride. well most of them won't be back next season. in 2017/8 were were getting crowds of 16-18,000 for a large part of the season.
The club should have done everything to keep us up.
Tan has provided the financial support, but the 'transfer committee' has been nothing short of pathetic. Warnock has shown he cannot be trusted with transfer fees as he has spent bucket fulls of cash on a load of players who couldn't perform at the level we were at. Madine, Tomlin, Ward, Bogle, Smithies, Cunningham, Murphy, Reid, Bacuna. At least one of the three loan signings was OK,m Camarasa (joint top score!). Niasse never scored! And the best anyone can say about After, for his reported Ł40k p week, is that he runs around a lot.
An massive opportunity missed and I can't see us getting back up there anytime soon , well not without a change of strategy.
Could have done more, like Fulham perhaps? It is well known the finances were dire. Also have you considered that decent players wouldn’t come to us. We basically gambled on a few loans who proved worthwhile. Most fans were realistic, that doesn’t mean we didn’t hope for more. We had a mountain to climb and almost did it. Despite the officials, the players had enough glaring opportunities to win a number of games we didn’t.
In terms of the academy, do you think we've been affected by Swansea spending so long in the Premier League? Surely with a similar catchment area it's not a coincidence that at the end of 8 years in the top flight they've got several very good young prospects and we've got none. Have they been hoovering up all the talent as a Premiership Club?
It depends what you see as failure, Dave.
In 2002 when we returned to the Championship after so many years of utter garbage, I said that 5 years with these big clubs in the Championship was as much as I could expect. Then we were certainly "little Cardiff City". Looking thorugh the list of our opponents, so many seemed so much bigger than us.
But snce then we have never been out of the Championship, have been to Wembley 4 times, and have been promoted twice, albeit relegated twice in the first season.
For me the last 17 seasons have been largely very very enjoyable. Like many others I feel the rebrand is behind us. The club is in good shape. At the turn of the century if you has offered me this, I would have said you were bonkers.
You are, and always have been, by nature a dissenter. I enjoy an argument, but who could really say that Cardiff City has not been a good club to support since 2002?
So I am looking forward to next season. None of us knows what is going to happen, but whatever it is will be interesting, from our relatively new position as a respected top six Championship club.
2003
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.
Well said TOBW. A great summary.
A very good point.I'd like to think that coming down this time we are in a much better position than last time.A bit healthier financially too.
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