Throughout this post I'll be referencing a WalesOnline survey whose results were released on May 19th. You can find the full article here (http://www.walesonline.co.uk/sport/football/football-news/cardiff-city-fans-survey-reveal-7135241).
Let's get started!
How did Cardiff City perform this season? As you already know, not so well. Their final results came out to 7 wins, 9 draws, 22 losses. The table below summarizes the Bluebirds' home and away scores against their 19 opponents...
In case you're wondering, the "Double" column refers to whether or not Cardiff City beat their opponent in both of their meetings. A feat they only managed to accomplish against fellow demotee Fulham.
When I look over these 38 matches, there is one clear candidate for my favorite match of the season: the August 25th, 2013 win at home against Manchester City. That match was the Bluebirds' second of the season, immediately following a loss to medicore West Ham United. No one expected Cardiff CIty to accomplish anything that day and yet they proved everyone wrong. Nine months later this win is even more satisfying, since Manchester City went on to become the Premier League champions.
77% of those surveyed agree with my pick. The next closest candidate for match of the season was the first Premier League edition of the South Wales Derby on November 3rd, 2013.
And while the survey did not ask this question explicitly, I think most fans would agree with me that the worst match of the season was the February 8th, 2014 loss away at Swansea City. After defeating the Jacks in their first meeting, Cardiff City were poised to execute a historic first double over their rivals on the biggest possible stage. For their part, Swansea City were in complete dissaray with fights breaking out among the team and inexperienced player-manager Gary Monk making his debut.
As you already know, the match ended in a Swansea City rout of Cardiff City. Blech.
There are many ways I could examine what went wrong this season, but since I'm still far from a soccer expert let's stick to the basics: defensive performance, offensive performance, and managerial performance.
Here are some Cardiff City defensive stats for you to chew on:
- 216 attempts on goal (19th in league, Fulham was 20th at 232 attempts)
- 74 goals allowed (19th in league, Fulham was 20th at 85 goals allowed)
- 7 clean sheets (tied for 16th in league with Hull City and Swansea City)
I think it's fair to say that attempts on goal is a stat owned solely by the defenders. Goals allowed and clean sheets are arguably jointly owned by the defensive players and the goalkeeper. However this stat is Marshall's and Marshall's alone:
- 143 saves (1st in league)
The 2013/14 Premier League Golden Glove (i.e. highest honor for goalkeepers) was jointly awarded to Petr Cech (Chelsea) and Wojciech Szczesny (Arsenal). The clubs of those goalkeepers each had 16 clean sheets and that seems to be the primary criteria for the award. Personally, I think saves is a more pure indicator of goalkeeper quality. I wonder how Cech and Szczesny would have done if their defenses leaked an additional 113 and 70 respective attempts on goal. #sourgrapes
Marshall did his job and then some all season. 94% of fans surveyed named him as Cardiff City player of the season. As best I can tell, the blame for this season's poor defensive performance lies with the quality and cohesiveness of the Bluebirds' defenders and with Ole Gunnar Solskjaer's management (more on this in a few minutes).
There's really only one Cardiff City offensive stat you need to know:
- 32 goals scored (19th in league, Norwich City was 20th at 28 goals scored)
To break down this stat, here are the number and scorer for all of Cardiff City's goals scored:
7 - Jordon Mutch
6 - Frazier Campbell
5 - Steven Caulker
3 - Peter Whittingham
2 - Craig Bellamy
2 - Juan Cala
1 - Mats Moller Daehli
1 - Aron Gunnarsson
1 - Kenwyne Jones
1 - Kim Bo-Kyung
1 - Craig Noone
1 - Peter Odemwingie
1 - Sascha Riether (own goal by Fulham)
To give some perspective, Cardiff City's leading goal scorer (Mutch with 7 goals) is in a 13-way tie for 30th highest goal scorer in the Premier League. That's terrible.
On the other end of the spectrum was Liverpool's Luis Suarez with 31 goals. The same number of goals scored as the combined total of ALL Cardiff City goalscorers.
As best I can tell, the blame for this season's poor offensive performance lies with the quality and cohesiveness of the Bluebirds' strikers.
Most of what I've written so far is pretty obvious. Cardiff City were a great Championship (i.e. Tier 2) club coming into this season, and they made some promising transfers. But they did not have anywhere near the quality or depth of their competitors. This fact alone would not have automatically doomed the Bluebirds to relegation from the start. Good managers can turn a team of mediocre players into a unit that's better than the sum of its parts.
Which brings us to our Cardiff City managerial stats. The table below captures Cardiff City's standings at the end of each of it's three managers terms this season. Mackay, Kerslake (caretaker manager), and Solskjaer in order. The table columns are: Position at end of tenure (POS), Prior Week Position (LP), Club Name (CLUB), Matches Played (P), Wins (W), Draws (D), Losses (L), Goals Fielded (GF), Goals Allowed (GA), Goal Differential (GD), and Rankings Points (PTS).
Let's parse the table above.
Wins, draws, and losses:
- Mackay 4-5-9
- Kerslake 0-1-1
- Solskjaer 3-3-12
Goals fielded/allowed:
- Mackay 13/28 (differential of -15, 0.46 goals fielded for every 1 goal allowed)
- Kerslake 2/4 (differential of -2, 0.5 goals fielded for every 1 goal allowed)
- Solskjaer 17/42 (differential of -25, 0.41 goals fielded for every 1 goal allowed)
Average league position during tenure:
- Mackay 14.11th place
- Kerslake 16.5th place
- Solskjaer 19.06th place
I hope the pattern is clear at this point. Malky Mackay was the best Cardiff City manger of the season. You really have to ignore all of Kerslake's stats since he was only in charge for two matches, but Malky was still better than him in all areas except goal differential and ratio.
Yes, Mackay's style of play was boring as hell. Yes, his relationship with Tan had soured so much that it was literally no longer possible to proceed. But we can only speculate where the Bluebirds would be next season if Mackay and Tan had been able to work out their differences.
Extrapolating from Mackay's 18 match performances we get:
- 8 wins, 11 draws, 19 losses
- 27 goals fielded, 59 goals allowed, goal differential of -32
- 35 ranking points
This is an ambiguous result, because we do not know who the one additional win and two additional draws would have been against. But regardless, the Bluebirds would have finished in 18th place at least. Possibly 17th.
I really don't think Mackay or Solskjaer were the ideal manager's for Cardiff City's debut Premier League season. But Solskjaer's inexperience and history as a player did not set him up for success. His claim to fame was as a striker that came on in the last minutes of a match to score miraculous goals. He tried to turn the Bluebirds into a more offensive unit, but their composition just didn't support that play style.
Look closely at the stats I've provided. Solskjaer's winter signings netted a grand total of 4 goals. If Mackay had the opportunity, could he not have gotten the same productivity from his own signings? If you put aside the 4 goals from the signings and the own goal from the Fulham match, Solskjaer actually had a WORSE offensive record than Mackay. And his lack of expertise in defense lead to 50% increase in goals allowed!
In my opinion you can lay the blame of relegation mostly on Solskjaer and to a lesser extent on the overall quality of transfers. Feel free to argue that it was the head office's fault for selecting Solskjaer in the first place. Or that it was the toxic relationship between Mackay and Tan that lead to this mess.
The survey results state that 62% of fans think Vincent Tan is directly to blame for the relegation. I think that's a mix of some of my above points pluse anti-rebrand sentiment.
So that is Cardiff City's season in review. Take a deep breath and exhale all the bad vibes. Feel better? Good, me too.
Summer is still a month away, but it arrives for me once I start spending weekends in Maine. It's cold and overcast right now, but views like this one of the Atlantic and Nubble Light always make me think the seasons have changed.
And so to have the seasons changed for the Bluebirds. Let's take a peek at what the Championship League has in store for Cardiff City.
Here is the list of all the clubs in the league:
- Norwich City (Relegated from Premier League)
- Fulham (Relegated from Premier League)
- Cardiff City (Relegated from Premier League)
- Derby County
- Wigan Athletic
- Brighton and Hove Albion
- Reading
- Blackburn Rovers
- Ipswich Town
- Bournemouth
- Nottingham Forest
- Middlesbrough
- Watford
- Bolton Wanderers
- Leeds United
- Sheffield Wednesday
- Huddersfield Town
- Charlton Athletic
- Millwall
- Blackpool
- Birmingham City
- Wolverhampton Wanderers (Promoted from League One)
- Brentford (Promoted from League One)
- Rotherham United (Promoted from League One)
And who will the Bluebirds field in this new league? Well there have already been three signings:
- Guido Burgstaller (midfielder)
- Javi Guerra (striker)
- Federico Macheda (striker, note this deal is imminent at time of writing)
But with the drop there are bound to be some promising players that leave Cardiff City. None of these are official (except for Bellamy) at time of writing:
- Steven Caulker (interest from Tottenham Hotspur and Southampton)
- David Marshall (interest from Liverpool, Tottenham Hotspur, and Arsenal)
- Gary Medel (interest from Valencia)
- Fraizer Campbell (interest from Leicester City, West Bromwich Albion, Sunderland, and Hull City)
- Craig Bellamy (retiring from soccer)
So what are Cardiff City's chances of bouncing back into the Premier League next season? I found a good Telegraph article on this exact topic. (http://www.telegraph.co.uk/sport/football/competitions/championship/10826050/How-often-do-relegated-Premier-League-clubs-bounce-straight-back-from-the-Championship.html)
Over the past 28 seasons of second tier English soccer, 23.5% of newly-relegated clubs get promoted back to the Premier League the following season. Not great odds, but honestly higher than I was expecting.
According to the WalesOnline fan survey, here's how the fans see next season playing out:
- Champions 4%
- Promoted 19%
- Top Six 29%
- Top Half 33%
- Bottom Half 10.5%
- Relegated 4.5%
We shall see.
Ok, last topic in this marathon post! How can you catch Bluebirds matches next season? I won't speak for the rest of the world, but for American Cardiff City fans these are the best options I've found so far:
- If you want to catch a specific Cardiff City match and don't mind paying, try Sky Sports Day Pass (http://www1.skysports.com/nowtv/). 24 hour access to all live events on Sky Sports for about $14.
- If you want to see one or two featured Championship matches each week, subscribe to beIN Sports channel.
- If you want to see Cup matches, subscribe to Fox Sports 1.
- If you want to listen to all Cardiff City matches over internet radio, subscribe to the Cardiff City Player (http://www.player.cardiffcityfc.co.uk)
- If you don't want to pay a dime and want to see every match, you can search for internet live streams of the matches. This is of dubious legality and I've never tried it personally.
That's it for this week. Thank you as always for reading. You can follow me on Twitter (@dragon_bluebird) and feel free to leave comments on this post or any previous one via the blog's comments section.
See you next week for the FINAL POST of Dragon and Bluebird!
