At 3 o clock last Saturday afternoon, Cardiff City had not won a match since 16 December. While a couple of draws had steadied things somewhat from the nightmare run of six straight losses that ended the Neil Harris era at the club, the thing I think should be borne in mind is that a loss at Bristol City with a match against in form Rotherham to follow would have meant that there would have been a strong chance that City would have been trying to improve their miserable home record today having not won in ten games.
Instead, the team that were struggling so much less than three weeks ago have not looked back since – Bristol were beaten 2-0, Rotherham 2-1 and today Coventry were dispatched 3-1. Amazingly, City are now seventh and what was a thirteen point gap to the top six just seven days ago has now been reduced to just six.
That Bristol City match now looks so important to how our season develops and I think there has to be an acknowledgment that City got lucky that day to some degree. I’m not saying there that the better side lost. Far from it, we were worth more than a two goal win and, truthfully, with Wycombe winning today at Huddersfield and the wurzels being trounced 6-0 at Watford, there might well not be a worse team in the Championship currently than our cross channel rivals.
However, I believe we were still somewhat lucky because we went into the match at Ashton Gate on the back of that very rare thing in this tremendously congested season – a week where we hadn’t played a midweek match.
On the other hand, Bristol had to face what may well be the toughest fixture there is in the division at the moment, Brentford away, three or four days before playing us and while I repeat that we were well worth the three points, that trip to London where they put in a big effort only to lose 3-2 must have had some effect on our opponents.
You may be wondering why I’m going over old ground here, but I believe it has a relevance to today’s game In that it was us this time who were in the Bristol position. in fact, our situation was slightly more testing than the one the wurzels found themselves in because Coventry had played well in drawing with Watford in a televised Friday night game a day before the Severnside derby, so they’d not played in eight days, whereas we had to come through a Tuesday night in Rotherham test in grueling conditions against an in form side.
Now, despite there being some very good things about today’s display, there were also questions raised which I’ll come to later, but any criticism I or anyone else directs at the team, should be tempered by a recognition that we went into the game under something of a handicap.
City led at half time thanks to a couple of Keiffer Moore goals and within a minute of the restart, Josh Murphy’s long overdue first goal of the season had us three ahead. Therefore, anyone who had not watched the game would look at the time of Coventry’s late goal and think of it as a mere consolation for a well beaten side, but a look at the match stats may offer the clue that this was not the routine encounter that a cursory glance might suggest.
For example, while we had eight goal attempts, our opponents had twenty one. Coventry had five on target efforts, whereas we were utterly ruthless in our finishing as we scored from all of our three on target attempts.
The foul count is interesting as well – Coventry committed eleven, while we were up at twenty four and I wouldn’t say that referee James Linington particularly favoured the visitors, I thought he was pretty even handed in his approach.
Tellingly, many of those fouls against us were given in the closing stages, when, frankly, we looked out on our feet as a team. The importance of that Murphy goal to take us three clear cannot be overstated because, without it, I feel Coventry’s domination of the closing stages could well have seen them cancel out a two goal advantage as City got the jitters to go with their tiredness – indeed a team with a sharper front line than Coventry’s (they’ve only scored twenty seven times in their twenty nine matches) may well have been able to escape with a draw from three down.
Jason Perry the summariser on the club website’s coverage got it right for me when he said that City won because they were better in both boxes. How Coventry must have envied us with Moore, Murphy and Harry Wilson up front, while, for all that our first and third goals were very easy on the eye if you were a City fan, Coventry will probably be questioning their defending for all three goals.
In fact, I see Coventry manager Mark Robins bemoaned his team’s defending while saying that it was their worst performance of the season. One of the reasons he gave for that was that his side, and the ref, allowed City “to kick Callum O’Hare off the pitch” – I believe Robins may be referring to a tackle by Joe Bennett at the end of the game there and, to be fair, it did look a naughty one.
Robins talked about a lack of fight in his team against a side that fights and, on one level, I think he’s being a bit harsh there because I was quite impressed by how Coventry knocked it about in midfield in a way that I don’t believe we can, but, then you think that, as Robins says, his side only really reacted in the last fifteen minutes in the manner he wanted them to and you know what he means – for all of Coventry’s pretty patterns, they got them absolutely nowhere as an attacking force for about eighty per cent of the game.
I would argue that, while 3-1 flattered us, much of Coventry’s superiority in the last fifteen minutes was down more to the fact that we were clearly tiring and yet, apart from bringing on Leandro Bacuna for Murphy on seventy three minutes, Mick McCarthy opted not to make any more changes until two minutes into added time at the end of the match.
Our manager’s reluctance to use his substitutes despite the fact that Moore (the one player City cannot afford to lose to injury in the coming months) especially was struggling to last the pace can I’m sure be put down to, Bacuna apart, it was, surely, the most inexperienced bench we’ve ever had for a first team league fixture.
With Alex Smithies still not over whatever it was which made him fall ill in the first few minutes of the Bristol match, George Ratcliffe was again second choice keeper and the most experienced of the rest on the bench was probably Ciaron Brown. Tom Sang, Joel Bagan, Mark Harris and Max Watters were in the group that had at least played some senior football and then we had Ruben Colwill and Isaak Davies who have been doing well for the Under 23s lately.
As it was, McCarthy gave Colwill a minute or so when he came on for Wilson for his first team debut – as the young player that our manager has spoken most glowingly about since he arrived, it was no surprise that Colwill was the youngster that got some game time, albeit a very small amount.
However, should more of our subs been used and used for longer than Colwill was? In our manager’s defence, I go back to what I said about this game not being as cut and dried as it might have appeared at first. Coventry scored after eighty one minutes and for those last nine minutes, plus the added three minutes, there was a definite feeling that, if Coventry got one, another one could easily quickly follow.
On the other hand, with Moore looking so in need of some sort of rest, none of the three most likely candidates to replace him in Watters, Harris and Davies had similar attributes to our top scorer, but they would all have been able to run the channels for balls knocked up to them and would, hopefully, have got us further up the pitch in those closing stages.
With us at Luton on Tuesday, I would just come down on the side that our manager missed a trick by not making more use of his substitutes. While I acknowledge there would have been a degree of risk involved, I can’t help thinking that there are similarities here to Neil Harris’ decision not to make changes during our last winning run late last year and we know how that ended up as far as Moore especially is concerned.
I suppose that bottom line has to be though that we found a way to win what was always going to be a tricky match given our recent schedule compared to our opponents and it would be churlish to make too much of an issue about the non use of substitutes.
As far as the game went, there’s not a great deal on the attacking front to comment on. Aden Flint’s finish from an early free kick was a good one, but he was, rightly, ruled offside. Then, on the half hour mark, it was great to see Josh Murphy chase back, win the ball cleanly, then burst forward to feed a fine pass into Moore’s path with the outside of his foot- from there, the player rated the best in the division according to whoscored.com showed his ability on the deck by stepping inside the last defender and scoring confidently from ten yards with an angled right foot shot.
Moore’s second eight minutes later was more mundane, but no less welcome as Coventry keeper Marko Morosi,, under challenge from Sean Morrison, made a mess of his punch from a Will Vaulks long throw and the ball eluded Murphy stood no more than five yards out, but found its way to Moore on the far post who tapped in from about the same distance with Coventry claiming a foul on their keeper -for what it’s worth, it looked a fair goal to me.
Murphy was not to be denied though and the second half hardly barely begun when Perry Ng showed quick and bright thinking as he took a quick free kick to Murphy while Coventry were preparing for the advance of City’s big men from the back and the former Norwich fan flashed a low fifteen yard shot across Markosi into the far corner of the net for a second high quality City goal of the afternoon.
Finally, just a word on a player whose form has definitely improved under Mick McCarthy, Curtis Nelson carried on the fine form he showed at Rotherham with a series of excellent, often painful, blocks which confirmed he’s now hitting the standards he set for himself last season again.
Finally, it’s now less than a month to the fiftieth anniversary of our win over Real Madrid in the European Cup Winners Cup Quarter Final First Leg in March 1971. To commemorate that anniversary, I’ve written a book called Real Madrid and all that – details of which can be found below;-