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Don't disagree with much of that. The wages and contract length, with hindsight, were bad for the club, but he's hardly going to turn the money down. He got a lot of stick, some deserved, some not, but the question is what caused the attitude - given he was getting abuse, could well be he thought "**** it". He certainly seemed to get a lot more stick than a lot of other players.Originally Posted by jon1959
I never saw what he did for us. Was he good at running around? Whenever I looked at the stats he was consistently one of our worst passers of the ball, least accurate midfielder in front of goal, provided fewer assists or chances than anyone else, didn't win much in the air and didn't win a great number of tackles. Admittedly the attacking stats are likely to be low for a defensive midfielder but his defensive ones weren't great, either.
Neither fowler or Campell scored many goals
Nor did jfh
And we didn't sell many shirts on the back of them either as they were often in the physio room
Just been reading back through the thread and noticed this.
I guess you're think of someone else as Nelson only made four appearances under Warnock:
Came on as a 23rd-minute sub at Reading - City lost 3-0.
Played the full 90 minutes in an EFL cup tie against Luton - City lost 3-0.
Played 85 minutes against Birmingham - City won 4-2.
Played the full 90 minutes against Bristol City, Warnock's last game - City lost 1-0.
Warnock's favoured pairing in 2019/20 was Morrison and Flint.
I always like Nelson's attitude and he was worth a punt as a free agent, but he wasn't very good.
6 goals in 16 games for Fowler is a better record than many strikers we've had. Instincts, finishing still there, body not up to it.
Sacking Warnock as soon as he got us promoted would have been a smart move but it would not have been a good look.
we paid 4 million quid for him and paid him a massive salary
£4m for a player who played 100 times. Doesn’t seem too bad to me
a reading fan I know still laughs about us paying that much for him
Didn't we pay him off just to get him off the books though. Otherwise as a January 2019 signing on a four and a half year contract he would still be here?
I called that on here! Jesus was I shot down (although i was happy when McCarthy joined). You'd happily replace players yet the manager is untouchable. Didn't Newcastle do this to Chris Houghton?
I always thought once he took us up he should have been replaced but can see why he stayed, signing players for good money is clearly not his strength. I think the signings after promotion were average to say the least but I could see their use if (when) we went down.
I think the signings, fees and wages after relegation were the biggest issue, they weren’t up to it and we had to bounce back having spent that money, biggest issue being Flint costing big money and unable to play in a back four long side Morrison. I think that signing ultimately cost him.
Like I said elsewhere tho, if I had a button and he either came and did what he did or he never ever arrived I’d still prefer he came.
Some managers do better with no money….useless with it
Think there’s plenty of times this season we could’ve done with him.
And Will Vaulks.
I that that he was OK and never understood why he got so much abuse. There were worse players than him.
Exactly.
I didn’t , can’t you read or are you just trying to be provocative for the sake of it? I was making the point that the signings of Murphy Reid Smithies and Cunningham made sense at the time as they were all highly rated Championship players.Says he who goes to review with hindsight.
I then went on to say I didn’t rate Madine Bacuna and Pack at the time they signed so I’m not using hindsight.
What I don’t understand is why I’m explaining myself again when you obviously didn’t read my post properly!
What was so iffy about the Schwinkendorf signing??
I was at his debut, which was away to Burnley (1-1, Richard Carpenter, last game before the uni Christmas break from memory!!)… and I can still remember Mike Ford organising him, telling him where to go etc. he didn’t seem to have any positional awareness. And then I recall a subsequent home game where he hit the post and didn’t look all that bad. Then he disappeared. We paid £100k for him??
we've had so many journey men players that have cost us and done nothing for us and a handful that have been decent
You don't have to explain yourself to me! I didn't ask for your explanation! I can barely be bothered to read my own posts these days let alone anyone else's!!!
But being as you've bothered, I've read your post again and have the following observations:
You said: "Josh Murphy and Alex Smithies were top end Championship players..."
What makes you believe that? Murphy had scored 7 goals in 34 (+7) Championship appearances for Norwich in 2017/18 - a season in which they finished 14th in the table. Meanwhile, Smithies had made 42 starts for a QPR team that finished 16th. Were either really top-end Championship players?
Bobby Reid finished 2017/18 as the joint-third highest scorer in the Championship. He was indeed a top-end Championship player as you suggested. City didn't lose much (if any) money on him when he was sold to Fulham. He's a genuinely good player and the stand-out by some distance on the list of Warnock signings from January 2018 to August 2019.
Greg Cunningham made 20 Championship appearances for Preston in 2017/18. They finished the season in 7th place. Was he really a top-end Championship player when City paid £4 million for him?
You also said Will Vaulks was an accomplished Championship performer when Warnock signed him. The truth is the player had spent just one season in the Championship, during which he'd made 41 appearances for a Rotherham side that were relegated.
It would have been if we'd hired someone competent at that level and stayed up. Given Warnock's record in the PL, can anyone honestly say that if their business depended on it, they would have stuck with him?
That was odd.
The received wisdom was that Bacuna was given a four and a half year contract (although as always the contract details were confidential). But that came from WOL ‘reporting’.
They didn’t cover themselves in glory explaining his exit either. One minute he had a year left. Then he didn’t.
Rather than him being paid off I think it is more likely the contract was always three and a half years with a club option to extend.
Too long and too expensive either way.
I could post plenty of links on here from the time of the signing saying it was a four and a half year deal - here’s one from the Premier League site which I’d say is the most authoritative one I could find.
https://www.premierleague.com/news/1010976
What I wanted to find was something by the club website confirming the length of the contract because I’m pretty sure they said it was a four and a half year deal at the time. What I’m not so sure about is the story from sometime last season I think it was which confirmed that the contract was for three and a half years, not four.
As you say, it was still too much money spent on too long a contract for someone who I believe burnt his bridges with Morison with his daft sending off at Bournemouth - maybe negotiations started to pay off the last year of Bacuna’s deal after that?
First thing to say is well done to Rjk for mentioning wages - despite all of the "in the know" claims you read and hear about what a certain player is earning, no fan can know for sure how much an individual player is getting paid each week. In saying that, my guess would be that City wages compare favourably with most at their level because, historically, they've always been thought of as high payers (going back sixty and seventy years the received wisdom was City had to offer transfer targets a lot because it was considered to be so far off the beaten track). Moving towards more recent times, in the latest "Under the cosh" podcast, Steven Caulker says he was offered a lot more by City than he was getting at Spurs (it's well worth a watch , Caulker's very honest which helps make it one of the best episodes of that show I've seen)..
I reckon there's every chance we were good payers under Warnock. So, it's not just a question of how much he might have wasted in terms of transfer fees.
For myself, I've always subscribed to the view that Warnock's transfer dealings as City manager got progressively worse. In terms of transfers, I'd divide Warnock's time with us into three. First you had the freebies he brought in early on and his work during the summer of 2017 which I consider to be outstanding apart from the signing of Lee Tomlin which proved to be a preview of the sort of problems we'd see in the future. Warnock is on record as saying that the only time he built his team around a single player was with the mercurial Adel Taarabt at QPR and it would not happen again. So, you wonder why Warnock bothered with Tomlin who, matchwinner he might be every now and again, was no Taarabt and he hardly strikes me as your typical Warnock player. It was only when Neil Harris came on the scene that we saw the best of Tomlin - for a while at least.
Second, there's the middle period which I'd say was the run up to promotion and our season in the Premier League. This period started with the disastrous signing of Gary Madine (my own view is that we had a far better player already at the club who Warnock was virtually ignoring who was far better than Madine - Anthony Pilkington). Warnock's dealings during the summer of 2018 were not a disaster in my view, but they weren't great either -Smithies was an okay signing who got to prove his worth by the time he left and Cunningham (a proven performer at Championship level) didn't.
Murphy was an exciting signing at the time and made a great start with us, but Warnock had lost faith in him by the end of the season and, given the way the rest of his City career went and what has happened to him since he left us, you can't really blame Vincent Tan for singling the deal out for a mention. Murphy is more proof of Warnock's problem when it comes to "flair" players, but, even more revealing is Bobby Decodova-Reid who has been a regular starter in a Fulham team that has been comfortable in the top half of the Premier League for all of this season.
Decodova-Reid clearly has ability, but he also has a very good work ethic, doesn't hide from the physical side of the game and is proven to be a versatile performer. He should have been someone who Warnock loved having at the club because he had so many qualities Warnock values and yet he appeared clueless as to how to get the best out of the player and I'd argue that Warnock's preferred starting eleven in the second half of 18/19 probably didn't have Decodova-Reid in it. The former Bristol City man was a converted midfielder when he joined City, so why not give him a try there if he didn't think he was up to playing up front? We did well to get our money back for Decodova-Reid who had made it clear that he wanted to move on, but Warnock was too rigid in his handling of the player in my opinion.
There were also the loan signings of Arter and Camarasa - the first had a phenomenal work rate, but was going over the top by the time we got him and, although the second provided some great moments and memories, he barely got a game when he was on loan at Palace and so, at best, I'd say you can't rate either signing as better than decent. Then, of course, there was Emiliano Sala who we cannot say much about, but I will observe that, if he had lived and done well here, he would have been bucking what was becoming a trend of expensive Warnock signings who, for one reason or another, failed to do the business at Cardiff - Leandro Bacuna was an example of this, I don't see how any one can rate him as anything other than poor signing.
Finally there's the end period signings which consists of what I see as the disastrous summer 2019 intake. One thing I'd like to say here is that the I don't agree with the use by some of the word "hindsight" in relation to this group of signings - there were plenty at the time who were saying they were poor signings and they were soon proved to be right. I was one of those, I argued that the Championship had changed while we'd been in the Premier League - Norwich had won the league with a team based on speed and skill and it seemed to be more of a footballing league. That view hasn't worn well as subsequent seasons have shown that power and direct play still has a place in the Championship, but Warnock seemed obsessed with producing the most Warnock like team ever seen - "Warnockball on steroids" as Nathan Blake called it.
My view of the players signed during the summer of 2019 is broadly the same - not bad on an individual basis, but a disaster when it came to trying to build a team. For example, stick the Aden Flint of 2019 alongside, say a Perry Ng or Cedric Kipre and you have a decent partnership, but not with Sean Morrison. I always liked Marlon Pack when he was with the wurzels, but their supporters were saying good player in his time, but he's too slow now when we signed him and, essentially, he spent three seasons with us proving them right. Then you have the strange case of Will Vaulks, a player who Warnock implied he wouldn't have signed if Pack had been available at the time - Warnock also hinted that Vaulks lacked self belief and made little use of him before he left the club in November 2019. In a way I could understand Warnock's point there as the Vaulks of August to November was always a different one to the Vaulks of November to May while he was at City!
So, having opted for a defence and midfield built very much on power, long balls and a slow tempo of play, who did Warnock opt to have leading the line - a technician in Robert Glatzel who was like a duck out of water in the team Warnock built and an apparent speedster in IsaacVassell who came here with a record of significant injury problems and only played first team football with is for about a month before booking into the club physio's room for a few years. I will say that Curtis Nelson wasn't a bad signing mind, given we got him on a Bosman.
What Warnock put together during the summer of 2019 was a complete mess, not only that, it was an expensive complete mess thats legacy lives on into this season.
Finally, a few words about the McKay brothers, I saw them play five or six times for what was the under 23 team then and they weren't awful, they didn't look completely out of place at that level. However, they were worse than the players they were replacing at the club and I'd say their subsequent careers bear that out - I have to conclude that signing for us was not wholly down to their football ability.
If I had to mark Warnock's transfer dealings during his time at Cardiff out of ten, I couldn't give him more than a five and I'd say a four is more realistic.
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