I'm rooting for Cardiff City boss Neil Harris but he faces make or break time against Swansea City
I'm team Harris & Club needs to back him & the fans need too.
By Scott Johnson
Thursday 3rd December 2020
There is no better sounding board than a football crowd. If a performance is lacking, expect to be booed off. If an individual is excelling, it is likely to end up with them having a song in their honour. It is a meritocracy and lets you know exactly where you stand.
Of course, there have been no crowds for about nine months now and in their absence, we are left with only social media, which is always hysterical. It veers from one extreme to the other, with very little in between. You’re either going up or going down.
In the last few weeks, the Twitter hive mind has had their sights set on Neil Harris and it hasn’t been pretty.
A downturn in results and performances has seen some turn on Harris. He has been accused of being too boring, too negative and too not very good.
These are not the best of times though and you wonder if the current climate is also playing a part here. Locked down during a worldwide pandemic, what else have we got to do other than immerse ourselves in our local club more than ever before?
Every word of Harris’ press conferences are poured over for signs of negativity or weakness. In my opinion he is often misconstrued, but when you bear in mind that three games a week results in him appearing before the press six times, is it any wonder that they start to bleed into each other?
I think we can all agree that it has been an underwhelming start to the season. Expectations were sky high after such an impressive end to last season, but for the second year running, under two different managers, they have limped out of the blocks.
Harris recently claimed that he underestimated how much Cardiff’s play-off push and eventual disappointment had taken out of his players. With very little turnaround and an abridged pre-season, they were straight back at it. Also, it took until the very end of the transfer window, which this year closed in October, for the club to complete their transfer activity.
Now I can keep listing off mitigating circumstances like international breaks and injuries, but none of that excuses the first half at QPR or the desperately poor showing at Coventry. It was nowhere near good enough and a genuine cause for concern.
Harris was the first to admit this.
He was bubbling after the QPR and gave his players both barrels. It was an emotive reaction that could have accelerated his own demise, but Cardiff’s best performance of the season followed with a controlled, swaggering showing against Barnsley. I feared for him ahead of that QPR game, but I personally feel you have to credit his man-management because he evidently made the right call.
Another lull soon followed and the Coventry performance was so lacking in every department that I genuinely felt that, under the current circumstances, Harris might lose his job. He looked devastated in his post-match press conference and you feared the worst.
I wonder what difference a crowd would have made during these games. Would they have somehow lifted the players, or instead condemned the manager? Had they turned on Harris, it would have almost certainly led to his downfall. Maybe the wider fanbase are not as anti-Harris as the Twitter echo chamber sometimes appears, though. It’s impossible to know for sure.
It can’t be easy manging a club without fans. You need that instant feedback, while some players need that lift or kick up the backside sometimes. It’s a double-edged sword, I guess. Harris missed out on his fair share of plaudits at the tail end of last season, but has avoided his fair share of grief in recent weeks.
If we’re picking sides here, I’m Team Harris. I think he has done a good job, in very difficult circumstances, following a very tough act in Neil Warnock. I think the Barnsley performance is a truer reflection of the Cardiff side he has assembled than the Coventry game and he deserves a show of support.
What is the alternative? I’ve heard people mooting Eddie Howe and Marco Silva, who may be available, but have far bigger fish to fry and wage demands to match. Anyone touting Craig Bellamy is perhaps choosing to ignore the manner of his departure from the club, while Nigel Pearson is a prickly pear that has done very little of note in the last five years or so.
Maybe the club needed to make public their objective of being in and around the top six at Christmas to pacify supporters, but it hardly helped Harris. If he achieves that feat, or is given the opportunity to, it should therefore result in a public pat on the back.
The recent victories over Luton and Huddersfield were very impressive and suddenly the Coventry game feels a very long time ago. Cardiff are once again looking up rather than down and Harris deserves a great deal of credit for that. Whether he gets it is another matter.
Cardiff now have a run of games against sides in front of them in the table and have the opportunity to close the gap on the play-off places, but everything still hangs in the balance and Swansea are just around the corner.
Just like last season, Cardiff are the hunters once again. They look hungry, but supporters need to be fed, too, and if they emerge starving from the all-you-can-eat buffet that is the South Wales derby, it could be the point of no return.
It’s now make or break time and I’m rooting for you, Neil.
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