Originally Posted by
the other bob wilson
Being the token striker or creator in modern day Cardiff teams is a tough, perhaps impossible job. A target man type striker is stuck up front by himself with no support except for the token creator sometimes and, especially under this manager, a pair of “wingers” who are told to play in a manner that most wouldn’t recognise as wing play of the sort we grew up watching. The striker barely gets a cross to feed off from open play and yet is told score us twenty goals a season.
It’s similar with the player saddled with the team’s creativity who is told it’s up to you to provide the service for our striker to score the majority of his twenty goals a season. Who has been a successful creator in City teams in the fairly recent past? Nearly twenty years ago, Jason Koumas was, but I’d argue that we were a different type of team back then - for a start we had what I’d call proper wingers and he had two strikers to work with much of the time.
Harry Wilson actually had a twenty goal a season in his team to work with, but I think his stay here has to be seen as a failure because the target was very much the top six in 20/21 and by the end of the season there were times when Mick McCarthy was leaving him on the bench - Wilson rather falls into the too good for the Championship, but not good enough for the Premier League group, but if he struggled anyway in the Championship, it was at Cardiff, why was that I wonder?
The only player in the modern era who successfully carried the weight of the teams creativity on his shoulders was Lee Tomlin for a few months during 19/20 under Neil Harris - Tomlin was the biggest single reason why we made the Play Offs that year, but before and after Harris he was a bit part player here and I would say that was because NMessts Warnock and McCarthy never trusted him.
I’m trying to give up Rubin Colwill threads in the same way others try to give up smoking, so I’ll just say that, like all players of his type who have represented modern day Cardiff City teams, he has been set a very high bar because the outlook under nearly all of our recent managers has been so defensive from open play - others who are better than Colwill have tried to clear that bar and not succeeded.
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