FT: CARDIFF CITY 1 - 1 SHEFFIELD WEDNESDAY. Match thread

[Nobody's Rep]

The biggest mistake Riza is making is not owning it, even if he genuinely believed that it had nothing to do with him, he still has to take responsibility for the 2nd half performance, that's his job, he's the last one to leave the sinking ship. It tells us a bit about his character, and he has to be careful, precious footballers don't like being criticised.

This with bells on - good leaders (not even great ones) always delegate responsibility to the team but never ever lose accountability and that is the problem for riza

However he is simply mirroring the culture of the club in recent years when none of the "leaders" take accountability for their decisions and actions

Riza to me is simply a symptom of the root cause and that is a lack of leadership in the club at all levels - board room managers office and the pitch - as an example dalman turning up at a press conference to unveil bulut and say he has mojo back is not leadership when you are not visible when the proverbial hits the fan and that proverbial is of your own making

How Tan can look at the performance of himself and his so called leaders and not make changes baffles me as this is the root cause - everything else merely symptoms

The comfort I took from yesterday perversely is that the first half performance (especially for the younger home grown players that hopefully will be here next season) gave me hope that league one would be more enjoyable - with a couple of good experienced additions with a bit of leadership that is but then we have the overall management of the club not capable of seeing what is needed

Some anniversary for them to oversee a bit like the shit show that was our last season at ninian

Roll on 2027 and what the feck they ruin it with then

[bluesp]

You can fault Riza for some questionable substitutions yesterday [what the hell does he see in El Lazy], but I doubt Ng would have thrown himself to the ground looking for a free kick, but ended up giving away the corner, with a manager like Warnock in charge.

I've made the point elsewhere that that kind of "challenge" often results in a free kick for the defender and Wednesday had one a few minutes before. I don't think either warranted a free kick but if the referee gives one...The thought of Warnock or similar being back in charge does give me the fear though, he was right at the time for us but caused longer term damage after he left.

[Joe Gillis]

yes I can see that I'm entirely on my own here, that doesn't bother me in the slightest.

to me it just seems like an air of desperation, that people want to blame everything on the manager if we got anything other than a win because we are in the last chance saloon.

the way I see it we played really well in the first half, and we're very fun to watch.
the start of the second half they were getting on top, and scored from an inventive free kick.
then on about 60 minutes we brought on subs and they weren't dominant any more, we finished the stronger of the 2 sides (albeit not as dominant as the first half)

people criticise the subs, and I can understand that, but it did stop Wednesdays dominance.
so really there was a 15 minute period at the start of the second half where they had got on top- I don't think thats too long to trust your players to work out how to work that out on the pitch before you need to change it yourself.

yes it's a disappointing result, especially given the others around us but we were actually pretty good yesterday.

if we had Wednesday's set piece coaches (I believe it's Purse and Ward in charge of ours?) then it would have probably been a very comfortable win.

I doubt we'd be very good at set pieces aerially as we dont have a decent header of the ball in the club, but I agree about the set piece coaching staff as we never look a threat from them.
Re Riza, good managers are proactive, Riza's subs are nearly always reactive

[Father Dougal]

This with bells on - good leaders (not even great ones) always delegate responsibility to the team but never ever lose accountability and that is the problem for riza

However he is simply mirroring the culture of the club in recent years when none of the "leaders" take accountability for their decisions and actions

Riza to me is simply a symptom of the root cause and that is a lack of leadership in the club at all levels - board room managers office and the pitch - as an example dalman turning up at a press conference to unveil bulut and say he has mojo back is not leadership when you are not visible when the proverbial hits the fan and that proverbial is of your own making

How Tan can look at the performance of himself and his so called leaders and not make changes baffles me as this is the root cause - everything else merely symptoms

The comfort I took from yesterday perversely is that the first half performance (especially for the younger home grown players that hopefully will be here next season) gave me hope that league one would be more enjoyable - with a couple of good experienced additions with a bit of leadership that is but then we have the overall management of the club not capable of seeing what is needed

Some anniversary for them to oversee a bit like the shit show that was our last season at ninian

Roll on 2027 and what the feck they ruin it with then

Riza "i take full responsibilty"

Also riza- then proceeds to spend the rest of the interview detailing exactly all the reasons how it isnt his fault.

[PontBlue]

I doubt we'd be very good at set pieces aerially as we dont have a decent header of the ball in the club, but I agree about the set piece coaching staff as we never look a threat from them.
Re Riza, good managers are proactive, Riza's subs are nearly always reactive

We just had a two week break with very few players off on international duty yet it looks like they spent no time on corners, attacking or defending. We were rarely likely to score from a corner but apart from one we tried the same shit every time. Where's the invention and ingenuity?

[Father Dougal]

We just had a two week break with very few players off on international duty yet it looks like they spent no time on corners, attacking or defending. We were rarely likely to score from a corner but apart from one we tried the same shit every time. Where's the invention and ingenuity?

Exactly. Set pieces arent just about having big players. Teams show that all the time.

In fairness to riza I do think riza could be a half decent under 23 manager. He seems to want to do things the "right" way overall and the first half showed that.

However as a manager for a team in the situation we are in its just not enough for what we need. Other teams who arent much more talented than us have either pulled away or are pulling us in- due to game management which is the difference.

Im not defending our players but also dont see why we couldnt compete with likes of preston qpr and milwall safely in mid table. With a half decent manager i think we could.

[Don Corleone]

yes I can see that I'm entirely on my own here, that doesn't bother me in the slightest.

to me it just seems like an air of desperation, that people want to blame everything on the manager if we got anything other than a win because we are in the last chance saloon.

the way I see it we played really well in the first half, and we're very fun to watch.
the start of the second half they were getting on top, and scored from an inventive free kick.
then on about 60 minutes we brought on subs and they weren't dominant any more, we finished the stronger of the 2 sides (albeit not as dominant as the first half)

people criticise the subs, and I can understand that, but it did stop Wednesdays dominance.
so really there was a 15 minute period at the start of the second half where they had got on top- I don't think thats too long to trust your players to work out how to work that out on the pitch before you need to change it yourself.

yes it's a disappointing result, especially given the others around us but we were actually pretty good yesterday.

if we had Wednesday's set piece coaches (I believe it's Purse and Ward in charge of ours?) then it would have probably been a very comfortable win.

I can see what you’re saying and earlier in the season I would have come away disappointed in the result but not the actual performance and would have taken encouragement from that first half. However we are running out of time, our rivals Derby Luton Stoke and Portsmouth are now finding ways to win games , even if it’s not pretty, whereas we still have this soft underbelly that means we always look like conceding at some point in a game and just can’t keep a clean sheet. It’s no coincidence that our rivals yesterday all won by not conceding. I heard on the radio yesterday on the way to the game we’ve lost something like 24 points from winning positions ( whereas in comparison Wednesday have lost 9 points!)

As Eric pointed out we won all 50/50 challenges in the first half and then none in the first 15 minutes of the 2nd half. Is that a mentality thing to see such a drop off in performance?

The crumbs of comfort is we do now look capable of scoring, Salech has been an impressive signing and the return of Davies adds another attacking option . What we need to do is stop conceding and maybe we have to set up more defensively, especially away from home and then throw everything at it in the last 20 minutes of games. Though we dragged ourselves back into the game yesterday we never looked like scoring a winner and for a team in our desperate position that was disappointing and what people were taking from the game, not the good first half performance

[Michael Morris]

[Pedro de la Rosa]

Ng would do what Ng does regardless of who was in charge. It's how he plays the game. He's a cheat, plain and simple.

This, a thousand times this. There's no point in trying to stamp this out of his game, he won't. It has cost us time and time again, and he still carries on

[D. Advocaat]

We just had a two week break with very few players off on international duty yet it looks like they spent no time on corners, attacking or defending. We were rarely likely to score from a corner but apart from one we tried the same shit every time. Where's the invention and ingenuity?

And yet, from the highlights posted, two of our four best chances in the first half (when we were playing well) came from corners. By that measure, we're not much better at creating opportunities from open play than we are from set pieces.

[Bobby Dandruff]

I've made the point elsewhere that that kind of "challenge" often results in a free kick for the defender and Wednesday had one a few minutes before. I don't think either warranted a free kick but if the referee gives one...The thought of Warnock or similar being back in charge does give me the fear though, he was right at the time for us but caused longer term damage after he left.

The referee’s performance was frustrating and ruined a match that wasn’t high on quality anyway.

There was no rhythm to the game as it was all stop start.

[NYCBlue]

I enjoyed that, despite the result. I thought we looked really good in the first half, and very exciting to watch.

they had a 15-20 minute spell in the second half and then it was more even until the end of the game.
we had like 8 or 9 corners and didn't do much with them, while they scored from their first?
you could tell they would score too, our defenders didn't seem to know how to deal with it.

if we play like that until the end of the season I think we will be ok. massive overreaction on here and other social media

I agree. We've been shit all season. We know this team has several shortcomings. However, yesterday was an overall positive. If we go down, it won't be because of yesterday. Sheffield Wednesday are a decent side. Although disappointing after an exceptional first half, a draw is not a bad result.

[A Quiet Monkfish]

I agree. We've been shit all season. We know this team has several shortcomings. However, yesterday was an overall positive. If we go down, it won't be because of yesterday. Sheffield Wednesday are a decent side. Although disappointing after an exceptional first half, a draw is not a bad result.

A Sheffield Wednesday side that avoided relegation on the last day of last season. Whilst their direct style remains they surely must have strengthened over the summer..

[NYCBlue]

A Sheffield Wednesday side that avoided relegation on the last day of last season. Whilst their direct style remains they surely must have strengthened over the summer..

Who knows? They are in 12th place. We're in 21st. What's that saying about the league not lying?

[The Lone Gunman]

Sheffield Wednesday are a decent side.

No they're not. They're a team full of journeymen in a dreadful division.

[The Lone Gunman]

Who knows? They are in 12th place. We're in 21st. What's that saying about the league not lying?

It's bollocks. Last season was evidence of that. We finished 12th. We were shit.

[Bobby Dandruff]

I agree. We've been shit all season. We know this team has several shortcomings. However, yesterday was an overall positive. If we go down, it won't be because of yesterday. Sheffield Wednesday are a decent side. Although disappointing after an exceptional first half, a draw is not a bad result.

Wednesday aren’t a decent side - they are poor like the majority of teams that we have faced this season and largely been unable to beat.

I don’t recall a Championship season watching so many terrible teams, which makes our predicament all the more tragic.

[Lord Worcester]

View from the stand:

Positives:
Team selection
Fluency and tempo of front 4 in 1st half well supported by mannsverk and full backs
Centre halves bar defending 1 corner!!
Not collapsing when it went 1-1 because it felt inevitable at that point
Mannsverk

Negatives:
Missed chances in 1st half
1st 15 mins of 2nd half. Awful.
The ease with which they scored
Substitutions - bizarre
Referee
3 mins added time. Also bizarre

[The Lone Gunman]

3 mins added time. Also bizarre

And merciful.

[Pedro de la Rosa]

No they're not. They're a team full of journeymen in a dreadful division.

We've taken the lead in 22 games this season I think. Proof how poor this league is, and how poor we are.

[Rock_Flock_of_Five]

No they're not. They're a team full of journeymen in a dreadful division.

Even when you come up against a poor, struggling side, there'll always be one player that the opposition has who gets you thinking "I wouldn't mind having him in our team" - there wasn't a single Wednesday player who made me think that way.

[the other bob wilson]

Even when you come up against a poor, struggling side, there'll always be one player that the opposition has who gets you thinking "I wouldn't mind having him in our team" - there wasn't a single Wednesday player who made me think that way.

Beadle (who was on the bench), Iorfa, Charles (who was on the bench): Bannan, Gassama and Windass without thinking about it too much.

[Rock_Flock_of_Five]

Beadle (who was on the bench), Iorfa, Charles (who was on the bench): Bannan, Gassama and Windass without thinking about it too much.

I'm basing it on their showing during this game, not on any perceived reputation they might have.

[Eric the Half a Bee]

And merciful.

I forget who our opponents were, though it might have been Preston, it had been a real stinker of a 0-0, the most turgid game imaginable. The added time board went up saying something like 6 minutes. One bloke behind me shouted out "you're taking the piss"!

[the other bob wilson]

I'm basing it on their showing during this game, not on any perceived reputation they might have.

And there I think we see some of the causes for this notion that we somehow have a squad which should be nowhere near the bottom of the table. We continuously over estimate our players and under estimate opposition ones.

Seriously, how many times this season has home supportewrs looked at us during one of our away games and thought "we could really do with four or five of them in our side"? I doubt it if it's happened once - take our last away game for example, which we won, I bet the Blackburn fans were saying something like we can't even beat rubbish like that as a way of criticising their own players rather than begrudgingly praising us.

I can understand why people might say the Championship is a poor league this season and I agree with it to an extent, but I think it's truer to say that apart from a few at the top and the bottom, the Championship is much of a muchness every season - you have about sixteen teams that are so closely matched that games between them tend to be tight, close affairs that end in low scoring draws or 1-0 wins. In this season in particular, we've dropped out of that sixteen because we have such great difficulty securing 0-0 draws or 1-0 wins and so suddenly it's almost that we have to score twice to win
a game.

I read somewhere last week that under Riza's management we're the seventh highest scorers in the division - we tend to score in every game we play, but it's seldom more than one and our problems at the other end of the pitch mean that opponents know that they'll still be able to claim a point in all likelihood even if they're havign a rough time of it.

Saturday was a classic example of that, although it was a much tougher second half for us, there weren't many times when Wednesday look like scoring through the whole ninety minutes, but they would have known that Cardiff will always present you with at least one big chance because we're no longer one of the sixteen, we're in the four or five at the bottom who are hoping we'll be the lucky ones to stay up.