Banging them in for Copenhagen again. A couple so far in Champs League qualifying tonight
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Banging them in for Copenhagen again. A couple so far in Champs League qualifying tonight
Could work well in trollope's new system?! :getscoat:
He's a better player than we saw. Looking at the clips he likes it played into feet or to run oni through balls. In the few chances he had here we just lumped it upto him from 70 yards away and expected him to hold it up. That isn't his game
Whether he was ever good or not we paid him a lot of money to never give him a chance to show us one way or another. It was truly crass how we treated him as an employee and I think it should be seen as one of the worst moments of those times.
He couldn't run, shoot or head the ball properly. He had enough of a chance to show he wasn't up to it by a good few years yet and so we wasted a huge chunk of money in nearly destroying a lad who clearly wasn't anywhere near good enough. I hope he's improved over the past 3 years - he couldn't have got any worse.
I'll blame the regime for a number of failures at that time, but getting rid of Cornelius on £45k a week was not one of them
Well I guess someone may have made a fast buck out of us.
I've just come back from a long weekend in Copenhagen. It was strange to see his face on buses & advertising posters for different things. Took me a while to realise who it was.
Bellamy called him the worst professional he's ever seen, and not in terms of footballing ability. There was something extremely fishy about that transfer and Cornelius was atrocious. He never hit the target once in shooting drills before the game, he couldn't trap a bag of cement or run. His diving "header" was hilarious.
I can't see how he could have been that bad - I mean he has 8 Danish caps even managing to get an international goal. He is also a fairly competent scorer a club level, albeit in a poor league.
I suppose the attitude thing may have been an issue. In fairness though if, at 20 years old, you get a £40k per week pay rise and a chance to play in one of the top leagues in the world it would probably go to most people's head!
My season ticket was in that corner and you would have to see it to truly believe it.
I remember one game he didnt hit the target once, the longer it went on the harder he was trying and worse he was getting. He cleared the net behind the goal twice, and eventually when the keeper and rest of the players went in he rolled one into an empty net and the Canton Stand let out a massive ironic cheer which although funny at the time was not a great sign really for an 8m signing on 45k a week!!!!
Some of Whitts finishing in those drills was a joy to watch, better than all of our strikers at the time only Bellamy ran him close.
Cornelius came in on a big money, big news ticket, and was supposedly on a huge wage.
Some of 'our more vocal players' might have taken some umbrage at that, and maybe pulled holes in everything he did from the outset.
I recall someone 'ITK' hinting around the time that word was that Cornelius was given a very hard time 'by some' .
If so , of course he 'only' had to prove them wrong, but I don't think he was ready, nor probably had enough in his locker to overcome it.
And there may of course be more to the story, financially.
Tan calling him a 'Toyota', was pretty low though.
The guy was unlikely to have been worth the hype, nor the cash , but is clearly not the utter gash that he was made out to be..
I can't say I saw enough of him to make an informed opinion of his ability, but there was certainly something amiss with the whole transfer - money that should've been spent on a player, or players, that could've kept us up.
Certainly seemed to be the beginning of the end of the Tan/Malky relationship.
Tan has doen a lot that he can be criticised for, but the same manager who asked him for a fortune to sign the guy, then turns round and tells him he isn't good enough - if I was Tan I'd have fired Malky on the spot for that alone.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Q_Igv0NAYo
No one came out of the Cornelius saga well.
It's funny how history has been rewritten with regard to the Cornelius transfer.
As I recall, the reaction from the majority of Cardiff fans when the guy was signed was that the transfer was something of a coup from the canny Mackay, who had allegedly beaten several other Premier League clubs to the lad's signature, while the player himself was widely hailed as one of the rising stars of European football and someone with great potential.
I can also remember supporters getting excited by the fact that Cornelius had been hailed as star in the making by none other than that wise old owl Ole Gunnar Solsksjaer, who was quoted as saying that Manchester United should be considering him as a transfer option. Ironic, huh?
Now, it seems, everyone thought there was something dodgy about the transfer all along, while the apparently ambitious manager wasn't bothered about his first season in the top flight or his rising reputation and was merely interested in lining his own pockets at Tan's expense.
"Then why didn't the ambitious manager play this rising star of European football who he had beaten several Premiership clubs to sign?"
Quite possibly something to do with the injury he picked up at the very start of the season which kept him out for months.
Like most people, I thought he looked very promising when he was signed. An obvious gamble at the fee, but very promising all the same. After 6 months, I thought Mackay had bought a player who was nowhere near ready for the Premier League at best and nowhere near good enough at worst. Now I think he looks like he could probably do a job in the Championship.
Well that's what I thought.
Also , 'some other things' seemed to come to light, but only over time (even though nothing appears to have been proven ).
I don't think anybody can truly claim to have had their suspicions from the outset, nor claim to have called it all correctly from day one.
It was a bizarre few years.
You're right, history hasn't rewritten itself. It's been rewritten by those who claim they believed there was something 'fishy' or 'dodgy' about the Cornelius transfer all along when nobody said actually anything of the sort at the time.
I find it amusing that people genuinely seem to believe a guy in Mackay's position would have signed a player like Cornelius for nothing more than personal financial gain. That is such a ridiculous notion under the circumstances, but seemingly there are those who are prepared to believe it. But then they probably believed the Emperor re-branded the club for commercial reasons too.
Whatever the reason behind the Cornelius transfer, it is the one event that Vincent Tan can legitimately use against Malky Mackay when he wants to accuse him of wasting "his" money. Before the Cornelius deal, Mackay had done brilliantly with limited funds to put together a squad which reached a Cup Final while finishing in the top six in his first season and, when delivered with a promotion or the sack ultimatum when given a healthy budget by Championship standards in his next season, he delivered in the shape of a title win.
There's no point debating about whether he would have kept us up if he had stayed at this point, but I find it very insightful that apart from Cornelius (who, according to the view prevailing at the club at the time, just had to be moved out no matter how much money we lost on him), we, reportedly, got all of the money back that Mackay was supposed to have wasted in transfer fees on the likes of Caulker and Medel. We probably took a bit of a hit on the Theophile-Catharine and Brayford deals, but this would have been more than made up for by the profit we made on Jordon Mutch and the expense for Odemwingie would have been compensated for by the fact that Stoke took over his contract when we swapped him for Kenwyne Jones.
Mention of Jones moves me on to how we have fared when it comes to trying to get players signed after Mackay was sacked out of the club. Has just one of of the legions of players signed between January and October 2014, when we were told transfers were to be conducted by a committee consisting of Ole and Messrs Tam, Lim and Dalman (we were even making daft and very expensive signings in the form of Ravel Morrison in the period between Ole leaving and Slade arriving!) made the club a profit when they left us?
The almost certain truth is that players such as Eikrem, Daehli, Berget, Cala, Guerra and Bergstaller (there's probably quite a few more I could name if I had more time to think) have been sold at a loss by us and I wouldn't altogether rule out the possibility that we may still be paying a portion of their wages even now. Despite all of the efforts to get his wages off our payroll, we only got shot of Kenwyne Jones when his contract ran out and now we have three more players where we could end up in the same position - compare how we were able to get rid of Mackay signings when we wanted to cash in on them with how we have struggled to get players signed by Ole and the transfer committee out of the club and it says so much about the how well or otherwise both parties did in the transfer market for City.
Simply put, this signing was a massive waste of money. The fee naturally brought a great deal of expectation, as it turned out, unfounded expectation. You then surely have to question the motives behind the transfer, particularly based on the subsequent, albeit unsubstantiated, rumours.
Cornelius arrived at Cardiff having completed just one full season of first team football. During that season he had topped the scoring charts in the Danish league, won the league's Player of the Year award, won his country's Young Player of the Year award, won several senior international caps, scored for the Danish national side and scored goals in European competition. It was hardly as if Mackay was shelling out big bucks for a parks player.
The transfer was obviously a gamble and one that failed dismally. Cornelius seemingly struggled with fitness and form from day one and never looked like being Premier League material, as was the case with Van Wolfswinkel at Norwich, who was signed for a similar fee. However, the notion that Mackay, himself an ambitious rising star in the management game at the time, made what was then Cardiff City's highest-profile record signing for nothing other than personal financial gain is just ludicrous.
In isolation, it does look dodgy. But should you ever look at a list of the, say, top 100 most expensive transfers made each season, you'd be surprised how many are useless.
Chances are, rather than Mackay pocketing a wadge, it was just a shit transfer that everyone involved regrets.