' Great hope for the new season '

Sport Football Football News Cardiff City FC
Paul Evans: Why Cardiff City's new-found strength-in-depth offers great hope for new season ahead
Aug 06, 2014

By Paul Evans


City's performances in pre-season provide a good idea of how the next few months may pan out for the Bluebirds

Pre-season friendlies, a waste of time or an indicator of what’s to come for Cardiff City in the 2014-15 Championship campaign?

“But it was only a friendly” is a term you often hear from fans whether they are being critical or supportive of their side.

I’ve done it enough times myself.

For example, two years ago, we were very impressive in beating Newcastle 4-1 in our final pre-season match, but I erred on the side of caution as I waited for the real stuff to begin.

I will try to claim I was right to a degree, we seldom played with the fluency or creative flair we showed that day, but we ended up winning the league!

Going back much further, I can remember watching Jimmy Scoular’s side that beat Real Madrid and came so close to being promoted, play their final warm up match for the 71/72 campaign and come a cropper 1-0 at Trowbridge Town of places.

This time I was sure everything would be fine when we started playing competitive football. It wasn’t - a fine team was in decline and the season became a relegation battle that was only won on the final day of the season.

This time around, City have played seven friendlies, winning four of them and only losing the one.

I’ve been able to watch three of those matches and have to say they’ve sent out some mixed messages.

I was able to watch the matches with TSV Munich 1860 and Amkar Perm on the internet. We won the first of those games, but I’m still not sure how!

We were battered in the second half, before sneaking a 3-2 win right at the end and, in the other, a Russian side who I had never heard of before (but looked very useful in fairness) basically declared after easing into a 3-0 lead in 40 minutes.

A pessimist could have really gone to town on City in those two games.

Given the number of goals conceded in the second half of last season, I’d been hoping that the summer would have seen the appointment of a defensive coach who could bring order to what was often chaos.

But, no, instead, we look to be soldiering on with what we’ve got.

Ahhh looks like a bit of the article is missing - just a heads up.