After this lunchtime’s goalless stalemate at Cardiff City Stadium in which a Blackpool side with the second worst defence and the second worst away record in League One kept City out pretty comfortably, I’m reading the words “we’ve been found out” quite a bit on message boards and social media.
I beg to differ, are we really saying that it’s taken about three quarters of the season for visiting teams to get around to trying sticking eleven men behind the ball, keep two rigid banks of four, or five and let us have the ball as long as it is in front of them?
There have been teams who’ve come to our ground and had a go at us, – Bradford did and, fair play to them, they were worth their win, but the other teams who’ve come to played more positively were beaten. Trying to think of the top of my head, I’d say Leyton Orient, Reading and Doncaster came with a positive attitude, Huddersfield, Barnsley and Luton all conceded a goal so early in the game that it was hard to get a handle on what their attitude was as the match kicked off.
As for the rest, I’d say that their attitude was little different from Lincoln, Wycombe and Blackpool, the three sides that have kept us goalless in our most recent trio of home matches with a return of a single point.
Most of our fourteen home wins have come against sides with a similar game plan to the last three visiting teams, we weren’t “found out” against them, but, in my opinion, there were two big differences that have not applied against Lincoln, Wycombe and Blackpool.
First, we’re not playing with a six foot five inch “old fashioned target man” currently and, second, any novelty value in our false number nine approach which saw opposing sides bemused as to how they should cope with what was definitely an unusual approach for the lower divisions has now gone.
We’ve had two big away wins in our stuttering run in recent weeks which have shown that, if we can get ahead while playing with a false number nine, it can be very effective against sides that have to come out and look for a way to get back into the game.
Unfortunately though, without Yousef Salech we’re finding ourselves in a position where we have to play in a more patient way which can lead to a situation, which certainly applied today, where what I believe has been a mainly successful attempt to play a front foot passing game becomes the sort of “tippy tappy” stuff that many supporters have an issue with.
With Salech in the line up, City had the ability to leave defences in two minds. For much of the time, they would be facing a team that played in what I’ll call the BBM way, but there was also the option, which City were not averse to using, of going direct towards the big man if needed.
Today, Omari Kellyman had a far post header turned around the post by Bailey Peacock-Farrell in the first half, but that was the only header at goal from open play that I can recall in our last three home games – lately, opposing centrebacks have known that they only need to be adequate with their aerial defending to keep us out from that facet of the game.
Put Salech in the team and central defenders have to stay on the back foot so to speak because they know that besides the movement of our wide attackers and sometimes there’d almost be two number tens all breaking into the penalty area to cash in on the uncertainty Salech would cause.
It should also be remembered that Isaak Davies has been missing for a month or more and, while his pace would not be as much of a weapon against sides prepared to sit as deep as Lincoln, Wycombe and Blackpool have done, his finishing ability would be welcome in a side that have been misfiring in front of goal lately.
Those who say we do not shoot enough should note that with their twenty six goal attempts today, City took our tally in our last three matches to a whopping seventy five, but only eighteen of them have been on target and ten of those came in last weekend’s romp at Exeter – again, I don’t think we should be criticised for a lack of goal attempts, it’s the lack of accuracy involved that is the problem.
So, for all, that City will be criticised for their “sideways and backwards” football, the truth is they’ve been getting shots away left, right and centre lately, but, in actuality, I think all that does is betray a lack of confidence in our players. Whereas before there was trust in the system, there’s a hit and hope element to our shooting now with too many of them being purely speculative with very little chance of succeeding.
Credit should go to Lincoln because they were the first to draw the sting from our false number nine system as they seemed to know exactly when their centrebacks should go with Kellyman and/or Rubin Colwill when they dropped into midfield and when they’d leave someone else to pick them up.
I’ve already mentioned Kellyman’s header that drew a save from Peacock-Farrell and the keeper did well to deny him from another effort early in the second half, but overall Omari’s not recaptured the form he was showing before he picked up the injury which forced him to miss a game.
As for Colwill, his performance today has been called terrible on social media. I disagree with that, he wasn’t terrible when he had the ball, I’d say the problem was he had so little of it. I don’t think I’ve ever seen Rubin have a more muted game than today and, if he’s going to live up to the billing of best player in League One which some have bestowed on him, he has to do a lot more as the season comes to its climax than he did today.
For all of City’s seventy eight per cent possession, twenty six shots and forty seven touches in the Blackpool penalty area, the visitors could claim, with some justification, that there were two occasions where they came closer to breaking the deadlock than we managed to.
The first instance came when forwards Tom Bloxham and Ashley Fletcher combined to good effect and the former should have done better than stab his shot inches wide. Josh Bowler was largely quiet on his return to Cardiff City Stadium, but he brought the save of the game out of Nathan Trott after a short corner routine.
Ryan Wintle perhaps came as close as anyone to scoring for City with a shot from twenty five yards which missed narrowly and then Peacock-Farrell made his best save to keep out the midfielder’s header from Bagan’s corner in added time.
Apart from that it was all a bit of a concerning mess played in a flat atmosphere with the lunchtime kick off not helping in that respect.
I find it hard to blame BBM for the downturn in our fortunes. However, I would say that the fact we cannot field a genuine forward on the bench apart from Callum Robinson ,who has a tendency to come deep for the ball like Kellyman and Colwill do, and I’m afraid he looks increasingly like a player that has age catching up with him (he made no impact when introduced after an hour today) is an indictment of our squad depth in some positions.
If we wanted to have a target man type striker on the bench, then you’d have to look to Dan Ola I suppose who has had only had mixed success this season in handling the jump from the under 18 team to the under 21 one.
We do still have a striker on our books who has done a decent job for us in the Championship at times, but Kion Etete’s form and scoring record since he injured a hamstring fairly early on in 23/24 seem to have fallen off a cliff. He’s failed to score in unsuccessful loan spells with Bolton and Rotherham and is hardly setting the world on fire in his latest loan move with St Mirren.
When you also throw in the fact that, according to Wikipedia, Etete moved to St. Mirren on 22 January, that is two days before Salech suffered his neck injury in the game with Stockport, then I think it would be harsh to say City had blundered in not keeping Etete around “just in case”.
It’s different with Luke Pearce though who gained some first team experience with City last season. The young Irish striker has often had me thinking “he has something about him” when I’ve watched him play for the under 21s this season. Granted his figures for the under 21s do not cry out that he’s ready for senior football, but he could have been a useful option to have on the bench at this time when we don’t have another realistic contender for the first team of his type available.
Instead, Pearce was loaned out to Finnish team IFK Mariehamn in February at a time when it had become clear that Salech would be out for some time – that looks like a bit of a mistake at the moment.
One of the regular contributors to the Feedback section has said on a few occasions that we should have signed a back up target man in January. To be honest, I’ve tended to think that, with only a week between Salech’s injury and the closing of the January window, we would have struggled to bring in anyone good enough to fill in for the Dane, but, despite an initially successful attempt to cover up for our lack of striking options, we’ve reached a position where we look seriously short in the final third of the pitch when faced with a team which sets out to frustrate us.
I mentioned the words concerning mess a little early about today’s game, yet the truth is City are closer to promotion tonight than they’ve ever been after this afternoon’s games. I think we should forget about catching Lincoln now after they beat Rotherham 3-0 today, but Bolton’s long unbeaten run came to an end with a 1-0 loss at, of all places, bottom of the table Port Vale. The news got even better as well as Bradford were beaten 2-1 at Burton. Stockport drew 1-1 at Luton and Stevenage are now sixth after beating Reading 1-0.
The under 18’s hopes of making it into the end of season Play Offs suffered a blow with a 1-0 loss to Peterborough at Leckwith this lunchtime.
