Reply With QuoteOriginally Posted by rudy gestede
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I agree with most of that but I'm not sure how we were meant to bring Ajayi through to the level he's at now. He played over a hundred games for Rotherham, even if he'd been a Warnock type centre half how many times would he have played ahead of Morrison, Bamba or Manga over the past couple of seasons (or Gunnarsson in central midfield)? He was unlucky with his loan spells here; he suffered a head injury at Wimbledon, Crewe couldn't afford to keep him longer than three months and then Trollope thought he'd need him for the first team here so he missed out on a loan move at the start of that season.
He settled in well at Rotherham but his contract only had months to go here by then. Why would Warnock want to keep him if he didn't figure in his plans and even if he saw potential would Tan have sanctioned a long contract extension so we could keep sending him out on loan for another two years? Why would Ajayi want to sign a new one here if he wasn't going to play anyway? Maybe we got a percentage of the sell on fee by letting him go a couple of months early but other than that I'm not sure what else we could've done. Jeopardise promotion by playing him ahead of better players in the hope he came good?
It was a shame he went, I enjoyed watching him play. My worry at the time was that a new manager might come in within a year or so and want that kind of player but as Warnock ended up staying for another three years that's irrelevant now. If the next manager wants to play out from the back he won't be grateful for what Warnock's left him but it's hard to be too critical of decisions that led to a promotion.
You invented the attractive football / 12th bit. Don’t think I said that.
It seems to me that because it has stopped happening at Cardiff, people have forgotten what sometimes happens when a younger player gets given a chance in the first team. Joe Ralls was given games back in 2011 in the early rounds of the League Cup and did enough to persuade Malky Mackay that he could feature in the Championship - he was picked in starting line up for the First Leg of the Palace Semi Final as an 18 year old. Ajayi, like so many others since then at Cardiff, never got that chance.
There's also the fact that Ajayi won the Championship player of the month award in March while playing as a defensive midfielder for Rotherham, but, at the heart of this is the simple question as to why a decision to get rid of a player for nothing, whose career has gone from strength to strength since he left us, should just be ignored when making an assessment of our manager?
Not given it a great deal of thought, but I can't think of anyone other than Kadeem Harris who that would apply to.
The crux of the matter in my opinion comes down (once again) to the lack of strategy at our club.
The best run clubs don't block pathways in the way we do.
How old is Mayembe now? He's got to be 17 or 18?
He's a dynamic winger who seems to have a lot of creative potential to play wide or up top for us, yet we've gone out and signed Gavin Whyte when we've already got Hoilett, Murphy and Mendez-Laing.
We're a club that offers no pathway whatsoever for younger players and players like Ajayi must see that.
The same argument regarding Ajayi needing to play at this stage of his career could equally apply to Nelson yet we paid a fee for him to sit on the bench.
Other clubs seem to send players like Ajayi out on loan after they sign a new contract at their club (see woodman from Newcastle to Swansea this season) yet our approach is all about the here and now.
Something drastic has to change at our club if we're gonna move into the modern era.
There are blueprints all around us but we just seem to bumble around like Delboy and Rodney hoping for the best.
If you were Ajayi, would you sign a contract at Cardiff with Bamba, Morrison and Manga in centre back; and Gunnar in defensive mid? He was 23, going on 24 that summer so he had to go and play games. I wouldn't have signed a deal.
Whyte for me is the player we should be signing. He's 23 but he's a bit younger than that in football terms, as he's only been a pro since July 18. He's had a good season at Oxford and we got him for a good price. Now, whether he's any good or not is another issue.
You do make some very valid points though, what exactly is Coxe doing? He's just being wasted.
Did we actually let him go early? I know that he signed a contract with Rotherham in March 2017, but he was still on loan there until the end of that season, wasn't he?
Ajayi had played fewer than 40 league matches when he left us. Nelson had played over 300 league matches before he joined this summer.
And yet he's "one for the future"!
I think that you have to take most of our manager's public statements with a pinch of salt.
Excellent post. I certainly don't intend to make a habit of sticking up for either Warnock or the club in this kind of debate but in the case of Ajayi I think LC and Pedro are making some good points.
Oddly enough, it was probably Trollope that did for Ajayi as much as anyone. After two loan spells the previous season, Ajayi featured prominently for us in pre-season and it looked like he was going to get his chance, especially as Trollope was playing three at the back. Some of the regulars just got fit in time and Trollope went with Peltier as the third centre back so Ajayi got edged out. By then it was too late to send him out on loan so he had to spend the next few months in the under-23s. If he'd had a chance in the first team then or had impressed out on loan then Warnock might have taken more of an interest in him.
So many players got released in Warnock's first few months here (a quick google says Menayese, Tutonda, Immers, Chamakh, Richardson, James, Phipps, O'Sullivan, Baker, Adeyemi, Ajayi, Bird, Blaise, Le Fondre, O'Reilly, Oshilaja, Patten, Southam, Wharton, Whittingham and Lambert) there was always a chance that the baby was going to get thrown out with the bathwater. I'll be happy to have a pop at Warnock about other things but I'll give him the benefit of the doubt on Ajayi.
Funnily enough, I can answer Lanre's question 'who was the 20 year old he didn't give a chance then?'.
The reply under that - 'he doesn't care if a young player costs him points. That's why he's a specialist in failure' could've been written by Warnock, or any number of managers. It's relevant in the case of our promotion season, if just one win had been a draw we'd have missed out on automatic promotion. You and TOBW might have been prepared to leave out Morrison, Bamba or Manga for a few games to see if Ajayi could cut it at that level (and, of course, there's the chance that we might have won the league by five points if you had) but it's probably not a gamble I'd have taken. It's something you'd have had to manufacture, Connolly was our fourth choice centre-back and didn't play there all season as far as I can remember.
As it was, Ajayi dropped into League One with Rotherham and was soon dropped himself after more of the dreamy errors he was prone to. I don't know for sure but I guess his (successful) emergence as a midfielder that season came about because he couldn't be trusted at centre-half. It's been a long learning curve for him and as we had three good centre halves already then Warnock obviously didn't feel it was a project worth embarking on. Zohore's learning curve was the priority at the time.
Nail. Head.
And even the season prior to that when NW arrived, we were fighting relegation into the New Year. We were only 4 points clear of the relegation zone after our game on Boxing Day Vs Brentford.
No way was Warnock risking Ajayi after he found the formula to drag us out of the mire and no one on here was vocal about it either at the time.
My points in this thread are not necessarily aimed at Warnock and are not necessarily a defence of Semi Ajayi either.
I don't expect Warnock to build a lasting legacy here, he's been in the game for decades and I don't believe he has done that anywhere he has ever been.
He will move on when he moves on and the club will build again from scratch with no foundations or building blocks.
My argument goes beyond that to why we are so unwilling to move with the times as a club and embrace the fact that football is moving very quickly and it's no longer Barry Fry on the phone in his portakabin, or Harry Redknapp wheeling and dealing like delboy trotter.
Why are people like Dalman coming out in the media and basically stating that they are satisfied with our "transfer committee" and structure that we have in place that would have looked amateur in 1986?
If I am gonna mention Ajayi it wouldn't be to say throw him in during our promotion season despite our defence being our anchor and platform at the time but to say why didn't our club see that the kid had potential and a new deal followed by a season on loan could have saved us 6 million on Flint?
If we don't go up this year or next then the parachute payments will dry up and we'll be in the same (or worse) position as the other 22 clubs in the championship.
Swansea have on the pitch assets to protect them from crashing and burning and they're also able to field a team of cost effective players (barring one or two left over from their premier league legacy!) who are on low wages with a genuine affinity with the club.
Even the richest clubs in the country are doing the same. Chelsea, Liverpool, Leicester, Manchester United, Spurs are all shunning big transfer fees to produce their own.
We are just closing our eyes and pretending that everything is the same as 30 years ago!
This might be slightly off topic but there's no way you haven't got time to read all that
I thought the same, it's about 2 paragraphs
Can't argue with that, and whilst Warnock has under-performed in the transfer market even by his questionable standards, I stand by my original quote ; were these set of players under another manager I doubt we would be out of the bottom 6..
All the more worrying for the new manager next season.
Harris was usually brought on when we were chasing the game later on when we our opponents were defending deep and there wasn't much room for the likes of Murphy and NML to run at defenders. Harris could get a cross in when close to the goal line with a defender tightly marking. He got us out of jail many times but I just don't remember him being as effective when starting and playing 90 mins
Which says enough then if I didn’t have time to read itI thought the same, it's about 2 paragraphs
“
Good post again. I'm hoping that the two problems you're talking about are connected and that even Dalman and Choo realise there's not much point in trying to create a modern, rational football club while Warnock's still here but that they also realise he's probably the only manager who can do anything with the squad he's created so they're just crossing their fingers and hoping he can pull another promotion rabbit out of the hat. His legacy will then be a financial one with which we can finally start to put down foundations and building blocks and move towards being the kind of club that you talk of. That's probably a load of bollocks but it's all I've got I'm afraid.
By the way, Ajayi was offered a three year contract by Rotherham so I'm not sure he'd have been tempted by a one year, or even two, extension from us. There was a fee involved as well apparently, undisclosed though. Hopefully we're learning from our failure to bring youngsters through. I'd like to think that we've got some genuine first team prospects in our youth set-up now, let's see how we handle them in the next couple of years. I worry about TOBW, if none of the current crop make the first team I think he might spontaneously combust.
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