http://www.walesonline.co.uk/sport/s...ncent-13561180
After taking the club from blue to red and back again, have Bluebirds supporters finally forgiven the club's owner?
Is it time to forgive Vincent Tan?
Or have most of us Cardiff City fans done that already?
It was scarf night against Brighton in 2013 that I reached my personal Tan-regime nadir.
The Cardiff City Stadium was full of red thanks to the free scarves handed out to supporters as they entered the ground. I refused one and sat solemnly through the match, watching us lose 2-0 and looking at my fellow Bluebirds, wondering what had happened to this grand old club.
We were a winning side that season. But I couldn’t help but feel a nagging sense of sadness, even when thousands swarmed the pitch to celebrate promotion that Tuesday night against Charlton.
And I knew who I blamed for that discomfort.
I’d taken a pragmatic approach to red – reasoning that we’d eventually return to blue and I’d be there, way after Vincent Tan had gone, to see that day.
In the meantime, going down the City was still going down the City. I just had to put up with the, erm, Bluebirds turning out in colours Manchester United or Liverpool would feel more at home wearing.
For all the pragmatism, the red thing felt weird – improper.
When fans chanted at us “You’ve sold your history”, I’d inwardly clap them, thinking to myself “Well yes, we have”.
But success and the chance to see Cardiff City in Premier League was enough to keep me and many others shamefully silent.
It remained a debate in the family between my brother, father and me: was all this worth it if we get to see City in the Prem? But for me, that’s where it began and ended.
I understood the feelings of those fans who’d turned their backs on the club, who viewed those of us who still went down as scabs – though I disagreed with their actions as much as they disagreed with mine.
Tan had come to us with a deal: I’ll turn your club red, in exchange for the kind of success you’ve been crying out for decades.
We’d swallowed that red pill, some more reluctantly than others, and success was the reward.
We won the Championship, only the third time in the history of the club that we’d won a league outright.
History matters in football. It’s part of the mythology.
I speak as someone who went on the marches against Peter Ridsdale – but has always loyal to the team: I’ve never booed a player, nor a performance – no matter how dire. Having watched City since the mid-80s, that includes some pretty terrible football and woeful players.
The red issue was bound to come to a head at some point, the moment things on the pitch started to go wrong.
That came in the particularly sour period when Malky Mackay and Vincent Tan were in a standoff and the fans passionately backed Mackay.
“Don’t sack Mackay,” we sang to Tan – ignorant of the allegations to come and oblivious to the irony that we’d become more impassioned and united about a manager than we were about the colours of the club.
But it was this moment which galvanised and united supporters over the colours and, ultimately, tacit reconciliation between fans and Tan.
After Mackay left, a period of particularly dire football followed and with it the appointment of arguably three of the worse Bluebirds managers ever – maybe marginally better than Russell Osman and Alan Durban. But only maybe.
With each dour Russell Slade performance, it felt as though Tan was punishing us for wanting our team to play in blue.
Every insipid game played out before ever-dwindling crowds was a statement about our place in the Cardiff City reality, and his.
Well, that’s what you could assume. What else was there to think when things seemed so bleak?
Amid a Football League transfer embargo, we had Alex Revell leading our line for goodness sake.
But perhaps all this was part of a Vincent Tan grand plan.
Because the sacking of Paul Trollope last season and the appointment of Neil Warnock has proved nothing more than a masterstroke, in public relations and football terms.
It’s academic whether it’s Tan or chairman Mehmet Dalman who can take the credit for bringing in Warnock. Because ultimately it is Tan who gave the appointment the go ahead and it is Tan who’s given Warnock freedom in the transfer market.
And what a summer transfer window we have just had, 10 new signings to bolster a team already boasting the likes of Kenneth Zohore, Bruno Manga, Sol Bamba, Aron Gunnarsson and our skipper Sean Morrison.
Warnock’s arrival at the Cardiff City Stadium is proof, if any is needed, that the most important person in a football club is its manager.
From him has come a sense of ambition and self-confidence; a realisation that we are Cardiff City and we are at our best when we’re fighting as underdogs – no pretty tiki-taka football, but gritty, determined and direct play.
With Warnock has come a passion that has been lacking since Mackay’s departure.
There is an excitement at the club that we’ve not had since our many trips to Wembley; since our Sam Hammam promotions; since the great Eddie May era.
What has all this meant for my view on Tan?
Well, he brought back the blue, invested in the team, showed commitment with the appointment of Warnock – he’s doing the things a steady-as-you-go owner does.
The fact that Kenneth Zohore remains a City player after so much speculation through the transfer window has only gone to make Tan look even more benevolent.
We still have a Cardiff City Football Club to support and we still play in blue. That’s enough to be grateful for to me.
It must have been difficult for Vincent Tan coming into an alien culture so entwined and embedded in community, tribalism – colour.
How could he ever have understood how fans would feel when he changed us from royal blue to his favourite scarlet red?
So here’s my opening question again, posed slightly differently: have we forgiven Tan?
I think we probably have as we cheer such vintage football right now, even if we might not care to admit it.
