Why intercity derbies don’t really mean anything
By: Martyn |
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As anybody living in these parts probably knows by now, the entire South Welsh Police force will be having a paperwork-free bonding session at the Liberty Stadium this Saturday lunchtime. The itinerary will include separating lager-breathed Danny Dyer lookalikes hell-bent on manhandling one another, lots of human-barrier forming akin to portraying the Berlin Wall in a pleasant game of charades, and constant correction of daft scoundrels who keep mistaking you for a pink animal with trotters and a tail.
Oh, and in the background, a game of football between the two largest Welsh cities is scheduled.
Along with their elder brother, the metropolis derby, intercity derbies are still regarded as the bedrock of British football. Foam-mouthed pundits will reel off the likes of United vs Liverpool, Blackburn vs Burnley, and Norwich vs Ipswich with all the enthusiasm of a wind turbine during a hurricane.
Yet other than a rowdier ambience, burgeoned ticket sales, and a free-for-all on the town that hosts the stadium for burglars, these games mean diddly squat in terms of one branch of regional politics triumphing over another. And anybody who tries convincing you otherwise is as misguided as Popeye is if he thinks tinned-spinach counts as one of his 5-a-day. Read the rest of this entry »
Category: Cardiff City News
Two can play that game you’re playin’
By: Martyn | 4 Comments
Due to work commitments, I missed the opening zwanzig minuten of debt-free (?) Cardiff City’s Beeb-televised clash with Nottingham Branches and Leaves. Fans and the TV bigwigs were salivating at the prospect of this encounter between the Newcastle-chasing duo: it was whole vs skimmed milk lids; Walker’s Ready Salted vs the same brand’s Cheese & Onion crisps; Pepsi vs Tizer; roquefort vs Red Leicester; and ultimately, a battle to see who’d be the most incomprehensible in the post-match interview – destitute Liverpudlian vs knock-yer-wee-block-off-sunnie Govan Docks product. An aspect of the game – a bitty, feisty goal and point apiece affair – that genuinely intrigued me was the chance to see the past and present of academy-spawned right-backs donning the same pitch in a meaningful encounter. Chris Gunter was a first-team regular with the Bluebirds before being whisked away for a clandestine love affair with Spurs. Alas, for all the allure of Premier League romance, Gunter’s upward-transfer turned out to be a condom-split-culminating quickie in the back of a Renault 5. Read the rest of this entry »
Category: Cardiff City News‘Phew’ at these few
By: Martyn | 7 Comments
By virtue of failing to capture a transfer target last summer, it appears that we’ve had a fortuitous moral escape. Marlon King was briefly lusted after, but thankfully negotiations barely went beyond a few e-mails/faxes/phone calls. Or texts, whatever it is club chairmen do these days (Ridsdale to Dave Whealan: “HI DAVE. CN WE SGN KNG PLZ? ‘PISTOL’ PETE” Whealan: “AYE, BOO TIT’LL COST YER…LOL”). King has just been jailed for 18 months on a sexual assault charge, amongst other things. While players at our own club have also spent the past week making headlines for the wrong reasons (yes, YOU, McCormack, you ignorant bundle of dog doo), the few million that was likely to have changed hands in luring King down here would have that made transfer a disastrous and costly investment. Read the rest of this entry »
Category: Cardiff City News10 reasons why Peter Whittingham is currently making life more difficult for City’s opponents than trying to pull a condom over Darth Maul’s head
By: Martyn | 4 Comments
12 goals in 17 games, 9 in the last 6, milestone hat-tricks, countless assists: yep, life is sweet for the left-midfielder at present. So pointing and laughing at Iridonian Zabraks aside, here are a full roster of toes explaining how and why Peter Whittingham is currently more potent in attack than the Luftwaffe was over London in September 1940. (NB – This list isn’t compiled in any kind of rank order)
(1). His new-found willingness to track back and tuck in have led to his team-mates and manager appreciating him more. Confidence, as they say, breeds confidence, and with extra trust being instilled in him by the tactician and fellow City players, Whittingham’s other assets have been accentuated. Read the rest of this entry »
Category: Cardiff City NewsNo Wanderers, Athletic, or United invited
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Chris Coleman’s dusky complexion and diamond-cut suit lend him an aura (?) that the charcoal bagginess of Dave Jones (and his threads) lacks. Nevertheless, it was the Jones-led City edging it in the alphabetical stakes who came out on top during a meeting the pair’s respective sides on Tuesday evening: a 2-0 margin that wasn’t as indubitable as the digits being restrained by the hyphen ostensibly suggests.
SYSTEMS, TACTICS, FORMATIONS
On pressed-together wood-derived cellulose pulp, it was same old same old for the “BOYS IN BLUE AND WHITE AND WE’RE F£$@*&G DYNAMITE”. MRSH/MTWS-HUD-GRD-KEN/BRK-LED-MCP-WHIT/CHOP/BOTH. For those of you who read that last bit of text as a conglomeration of punctuation and letters indulging in argy-bargy, get your code-cracking Vodafone-harvested grandchildren to the monitors immediately! However, confusion permeated as the match began with City’s defence (namely, the wing-backs) uncertain on how to handle the threat of 3 strikers (Morrison/Best/Eastwood) whilst simultaneously rampaging in attack as WBs do. Thus, our formation temporarily amalgamated into a weirder-than-George-Formby’s-obsession-with-Mr-Wu 5-2-1-1-1. Matthews was virtually simulating anal sex with the corner flag, such was the dominance of Freddy Eastwood in pinning him back. Meanwhile, Kennedy looked rather lost and began acting as an auxiliary centre-half. Rather than fully assimilating into this role however, he’d keep tentatively eyeing up the area of turf he normally stands around: his body language was akin to that of the new kid at school, awkwardly poised between pricking either the Adidas ‘poppers’-clad sporty-gang with their Blackburn Rovers and Newcastle United replica jerseys, or the one with them playing Pogs and quasi-homoerotically discussing how amazing Ken is on the SNES version of Street Fighter II. Read the rest of this entry »
Category: Cardiff City News‘bird feed
By: Martyn | Add Comments
Due to being stuck in t’mine shaft with only a canary and baa baa black sheep-coloured sedimentary rock for company, I missed Saturday’s 1-1 draw with Richard O’Brien’s Neil Warnock’s Crystal Maze Palace. Therefore, my usual probing tactical analysis will be absent. However, focusing on that which I have seen, namely, the goals. For what feels like the umpteenth time already this campaign, the one we concede just had to be sloppier than Mr Trebus. Danny Butterfield was given the necessary yardage required for one to bung a breakneck ball in, and in spite of there being enough home jersey-wearers in the box to provide table service at a banquet hosted by Prince Phil and Queen Liz, Alan Lee was the only player who attempted to mimic Shamu. A paucity of responsibility and positional perception has permeated those guarding the metaphorical biscuit tin this season.
Thankfully, we partially redeemed this lackadaisicalness with a goal of our own: one worthy of sackfuls of eulogizing superlatives. Matthews, arm movement as precise as one of those guys who waves table tennis rackets to help planes park, throws somewhere between diagonally and straight to the right-veering Chopra. His clever marker-evasion is complemented by a touch of defence-panicking resourcefulness. In he plays Burke, who in turn completes the sheer beautiful systematicness by feeding the onrushing Whittingham to bury with aplomb. With cleverness that’d make MENSA members look daft, touches that put the Impressionists to shame, and ghosting that’d get Spangler and his Parapsychologist pals into their uniforms, the gentlemen involved must be applauded for providing fans with a goal worth the entrance fee alone (and from what I’ve been told, there wasn’t anything else on offer in the course of the 90 minutes tantamount to staking said sum for…)
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Alas, consecutive campaigns and their Bluebirds-Eagles contests will forever be recalled solely for incidents so unsavoury, one would be nuts to consider placing them anywhere on the menu other than the section following the main courses. Read the rest of this entry »
Category: Cardiff City NewsWhatever happened to…
By: Martyn | Add Comments
A look at where life has taken some of the peripheral signings of the Dave Jones reign.
Jason BYRNE (01/07 – 09/08)
The Irish Gerd Müller was signed for a paltry £100k, and statistically his arrival seemed canny business. Unfortunately for Byrne, Championship-standard football is a pastime played in a vast surface area amongst a plethora of athletic bodies and a fast-moving balloon in a leather jacket: goal-hanging in Bono-land’s native league plainly hadn’t equipped him adequately for this leap in class. Positionally clueless and owner of a first touch that guaranteed his second was a tackle, life with the City had actually started promisingly. A last-minute match-settling debut goal at Wolverhampton Wanderers had myself and many others jumping for joy in the bowels of Ninian Park (away fans were banned for the game so the club screened the match in the old Grandstand bar). Admittedly, he’d foreshadowingly done sweet Fanny Adams in the minutes preceding that inconceivable glory-pounce, but then perhaps every week in the ROI has Molineux-like silver-lining for Byrne as since returning with Bohemians he continues to score at a canter.
Andrea FERRETTI (07/05 – 01/07)
The shy Italian induced copious amounts of homoeroticism from the terraces in spite of failing to do anything meaningful on the pitch: unless you count coming on in a dire Carling Cup tie at home to Leicester City and making Paul Henderson look superhuman. Ferretti’s Otherness – his name ended in a vowel; he was handsome, tanned and archetypally maned; he hadn’t been brought up playing on park pitches that resemble lumpy gravy with sprinklings of green crayon; he wasn’t Alan Lee – was his most endearing quality, as really, the summer 2005 arrival wasn’t all that good.
Joining the club after supposedly being recommended by Sir Alex Ferguson, Ferretti had time for some reserve team run-outs, a poor loan stint with Scunthorpe United, and several cup-comp appearances. He left these shores in 2007 to join perennial Serie B outfit Cesena. However, despite featuring regularly for the side in their relegation season, he did continue to figure prominently until the final day of their successful promotion campaign last time out. His reward wasn’t a bevvie of beauties lolling suggestively in a marbled-bathtub of marinated olives, rather a curt ‘arriverderci‘. You can semi-juxtapose the season being had by the Emilia-Romagnan team with our own, the club currently finding themselves in second position back in B. We’re both doing just fine without Fergie’s tip, who now plies his trade in the peninsula’s regional leagues with Pavia alongside Benito Carbone. Read the rest of this entry »
Category: Cardiff City NewsThese little town blues… are melting away
By: Martyn | Add Comments
2009/10s Cardiff City are proving to be owners of the most prominent split personality since Dr Henry Jekyll’s. Limp, moribund showings against the likes of Doncaster Rovers and the Parkies have been consigned to a dustbin seemingly reserved for anomalies: unless of course the 6-point-reaping, 10-goals-in-180-minute triumphs of the past week are themselves the occurrences rarer than a chortle-worthy Bruce Forsyth gag. Yet they just can’t be: we’re scoring goals from the halfway line for crying out loud! Surely this is all weirder than the fact that stoic, prosaic pint-n’-pie Yorkshireman Mick McCarthy played for Lyon? Or is it…? If I can ask this sans the misogynistic ‘I bet she does’ innuendo of your Lynx-sporting, WKD-strawpedo’ing Jack-the-Lad type; are we coming or going?
Cardiff itself is a city defiantly in the ascendancy, one that is definitely coming in both the figurative and literal sense. The current subject of much regeneration and investment, the municipality is a hip, energetic and fresh place to live, albeit one that hasn’t forgotten its roots. The cuisine is still heartily Welsh in flavour, the local Brains brewery still permeates the local club and pub scene, and the architecture incorporates the famous nineteenth-century shopping arcades amongst its sprawling, mollusc-esque modern and postmodern erections. The Cardiff Bay area hasn’t been neglected either, and although now far removed from its days as a working port and docks, the attention paid to creativity in the fields of arts, dining and culture in the area shows that the council recognises its importance to the very essence of the Welsh capital. New restaurants, shopping centres, and housing/apartment blocks are opening at a rate that’d give Billy Whizz a stitch: as an encapsulation of the stature Cardiff is held in by big businesses, the nation’s second-largest John Lewis branch has just opened here.
Factor in a world-class sporting arena like the Millennium Stadium, a brogue to the lace that is the famous River Taff at the very heart of the CBD, and of course, our own club side’s recently-opened new stadium, as well as an Olympic-standard swimming pool, a new athletics stadium, and a plethora of concert venues, and you have a cosmopolitan melting pot that warrants a club at the top level of the nation’s favourite sport. Except, alas, we’ve a habit of jilting the groom at the altar. As weak an analogy as that is, it’s futility best illustrates the flaws this club presents its followers with as round 46 draws ever nearer. Read the rest of this entry »
Category: Cardiff City NewsDickov and Derby dicked on
By: Martyn | Add Comments
As overjoyed as I was to do twee self-concious jigs and fist-swipes on no less than SIX occasions yesterday evening, it must be acknowledged that our visitors were more shambolic than an anti-Swiss Bedouin leader being let loose at a United Nations convention. In a game played at the sort of leisurely pace that’d make Subbuteo appear hypersonic in comparison, wee Mickey C sought to emulate ex-Internazionale striker Robbie Keane’s weekend feat by bagging himself a quad of tannoy name-bellows. City, in the home strip of chow mein Pot Noodle blue tops, white shorts and white socks, dictated the game even when County had possession. As much it sounds like we were simply colossal thus forcing our guests to cave in, that viewpoint bears only a semblance of veracity. The Rams, in their wedding-cake-icing white tops and Jackie O-shades black shorts and socks left themselves prone to humiliating food-based analogies. The outfield 10 so willingly allowed the sharp City blade to penetrate them without a hint of resistance, leaving the layer cake of one-time Cardiff bench-warmer Stephen Bywater to crumble helplessly, wholly unprotected by those in icing-white. It really was Eazy E. Read the rest of this entry »
Category: Cardiff City NewsIs Joe Ledley just a run-of-the-mill second division midfielder?
By: Martyn | Add Comments
ONCE UPON A TIME (or Amser maith yn ôl)…
in a land called Cardiff, there lived the most fantastic of all monarchs. His name was Joseph. Ninian Park was his castle, and all over the kingdom his name provoked nothing but verbal marvel and sheer joy. Heroic, handsome, gallant, brave, and noble, not to mention a sublime swordsman and accomplished archer, his subjects could not contemplate life without their leader.
Many a time during his reign Joseph had saved his meek counterparts and people, a race perennially threatened by the most grotesque creations God hath ever fathomed such as the Lebanese Hammamhead dragon and the Westham Warriors. Be they at the very peak of the Hawthorn Mountains, or in amongst the native Barnsley tribe deep in the enchanted forest of Wemberlee, his royal highness so superlatively slayed encroaching demons to save his people from all that was sacrilegious.
As his reputation and prestige swelled, so did the length of his admirers. The advances of dainty Lady McCarthy of Wolverhampton, shy Maid Moyes 
and the gorgeous Princess Pulis were kindly welcomed but rebuffed. The only true female figures prominent in Joseph’s life were his overbearing step-mothers: The grouchy but loyal, Di Jones, and the gobby but jovial Queen Tosh. Both believed themselves to be the closer of the duo to young Joseph, but in reality, the poor fellow had become somewhat wayward under the influence of his greedy gardener, Dastardly David Baldwin…
Now I’ll end this quasi-fairy tale here because they’re supposed to conclude with ‘and they all lived happily ever after‘ and that may not necessarily be the case. Read the rest of this entry »
Category: Cardiff City News
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