The idea behind these articles is that, because we’ve all rightly ignored the Champo while we swanned around all posh in the Premier League for three years, we should use this time to get reacquainted with our renewed and hopefully temporary ‘rivals’. But thanks to the romance of the FA Cup we’ve already played Cardiff twice in 2023. We even made a mug about it. But that was just a brief fling and all we paid attention to was Wilf Gnonto’s superbike volley. What have Cardiff City been doing the rest of the time while we weren’t thinking about them?
Hmm. Can’t we just concentrate on the FA Cup? Our last league meeting was in Wales, our first mid-pandemic match. Adam Forshaw took charge of the build up, telling the Leeds That podcast that promotion “is going to be a formality for us, that’s my personal view on it, I think we’ll romp it”. Then Junior Hoilett took charge of Kalvin Phillips’ stray pass and Leeds lost 2-0. This followed December’s match at Elland Road, when the first half gantry chat between me and The Athletic’s Phil Hay was about how, 2-0 up after ten minutes, promotion was going to be a formality and Leeds would romp it. 3-0 up early in the second half, the words ‘promoted by Christmas’ may have been said out loud but I won’t say by who because it was me. By full-time, after half-an-hour of Lee Tomlin playing like prime Cruyff while Kiko Casilla lost his mind and Pascal Struijk made a disastrous debut, we were perplexed but shrugging off the 3-3 draw. Unbeaten in eleven, and eight of those wins? No problem. We only won two of the next ten, though, which was a problem.
Cardiff had swapped Neil Warnock for Neil Harris in November of that season, enough for them to get into the play-offs and lose in the semi-final to Fulham. This has been their consistent approach – change manager in mid-season and hope for the best. Mick McCarthy took them to 8th, but replacing him with Steve Morison – yes, that one – only got them to 18th. They let Morison start in charge last season, but panic soon set in: Morison was gone in September, replaced by Mark Hudson who was gone in January, leaving it to Sabri Lamouchi to keep them up in 21st place.
One of the amazing things about Steve Morison’s time in charge is that, before he retired from playing, the Tifo podcast somehow took him seriously enough as a potential coach to record a 1h9m35s podcast interview with him to get to the bottom of the ‘Tactical insight and football psychology’ (seriously, that’s the episode title) Morison was going to be bringing to top level coaching. If you’d like to discover the psychological and tactical secrets of a football manager who W16 D8 L21 before getting sacked by Cardiff and is now boss of Isthmian League side Hornchurch, somehow this nonsense is still out there where people can watch it.
At Cardiff Morison benefited from having Cody Drameh on loan from Leeds, a spell notable for Wales Online’s feverish click-chasing with headlines like ‘Cody Drameh is a footballing freak and Cardiff City’s only hope is that Leeds United don’t realise it‘ above what seemed to be text pasted from Roberto Carlos’ Wikipedia page with the name changed.
The big stories at Cardiff through recent times have been, first, Vincent Tan’s controversial ownership. After sackings and arguments and apparently asking why the goalie wasn’t scoring more goals, his highest profile provocation was changing the Bluebirds’ home kit to all red and declaring, “No way I will change it back to blue under my ownership.” Less than a year later he changed it back to blue under his ownership. That was all over by 2015, and more recently the story has been about Emiliano Sala. Cardiff bought Sala, a striker, from Nantes in January 2019, but the plane bringing him from France crashed over the sea, killing him and the pilot. ‘Once a Bluebird, always a Bluebird,’ said the tribute flag at Cardiff’s stadium. ‘We’re not paying Nantes the £15m we agreed and if the Swiss courts try to make us, we’ll sue Nantes,’ said Cardiff’s management. ‘You’re banned from signing players until you pay Nantes,’ said FIFA.
The Sala ‘row’ still dominates Cardiff. They paid the first instalment plus interest to Nantes in January 2023, meaning they can now sign players again, but only free agents and loanees until May 2024. In June they were ordered to pay the rest, £9.45m. In return, Cardiff are suing Nantes for €110m. “Our lawyers came up with the number,” says Cardiff chairman Mehmet Dalman. “There is logic to it. It’s not a number that we picked from the air.”
Despite the transfer restrictions, Cardiff have still managed to sign more players than we have for the new season. The big name they’re hoping will change everything is Aaron Ramsey, as fresh as a chronically unfit 32 year old can be after 34 games last season for Nice. As part of the deal, his son is joining Cardiff’s academy.
Their latest manager is Erol Bulut, whose most distinguished managerial honour is reaching the Turkish Cup final with Alanyaspor in 2020. As a player, though, he had the good fortune to come through the youth system at Eintracht Frankfurt in the early 1990s, where he was a teammate of Tony Yeboah. At Cardiff he’ll be hoping to teach some of what he saw to Karlan Grant, once a £15m signing for West Brom, now on loan to the Bluebirds. The early view of the new manager, according to Wales Online, is that “he seems a very nice guy, first and foremost,” but, “His style of play has been difficult to decipher in pre-season.” Sacked by October, then.
Sadly Alex Smithies is no longer in goal for them, because apparently he joined Leicester in summer 2022?! No wonder they got relegated. I mean, he didn’t play a single minute, but still.
It’s hard to find much to celebrate in our record against Cardiff – we’ve only beaten them once in the league at Elland Road since 1983, in twelve attempts. Thank you George McCluskey and Alex Mowatt. Shared players and managers aren’t a great look either: the aforementioned Steve Morison, plus Neil Warnock, which means Lee Peltier. They did sell us Ross McCormack, though (interviewed in our 2023 Summer Special!), they gave Stephen McPhail a home, and Jimmy Hasselbaink’s career ended there in 2007. A passing note too for Peter Ridsdale, who took over as Cardiff chairman in 2006, and left them in 2010 with £66m of debt, ‘leading to concerns over the continued existence of the club’. The best link is maybe yet to come: they keep talking about appointing Sol Bamba as manager, and should stop talking about it and get it done.
If you thought half-time in the Crystal Palace game in March 2023 was a turning point in the history of Leeds United, as we turned our back on a 1-0 lead and Premier League safety and ran towards a 5-1 defeat and oblivion, well. Let me tell you what I can about Ninian Park, January 2002, between the flashbacks and the flying bottles. With the perspective granted by twenty years we can now see that there was enough going on behind the scenes to make that game more of a consequence than a cause, but at the time and in the record books it still looks like the moment Premier League champions in waiting switched course and started heading for League One. United’s Premier League record for the season before the match was W11 D8 L2, putting us 1st; afterwards was W7 D4 L6, meaning we ended up 5th. The match itself was a televised FA Cup tie at Cardiff’s horrible old ground that included a red card for Alan Smith (not that unusual), bottles and coins being thrown at Nigel Martyn and hitting the referee Andy D’Urso (who strangely didn’t seem to mind much, once he’d stopped bleeding), and a 2-1 defeat. Cardiff owner Sam Hammam had pretended he was going to calm the supporters down, but instead did a lap of the pitch to rouse them all up again, standing behind the Leeds goal doing ‘the Ayatollah’ while the game was still going on. To this day it’s one of those things you look at and think, how did they actually get away with that? ⬢
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