Cardiff Local Guide A guide to all Things Cardiff
Malky Mackay has worked wonders in his short tenure at Cardiff City. In his first season, Mackay had to almost rebuild his squad from scratch & on a very limited budget, when he took over from Dave Jones. Despite the overhaul, Cardiff reached the Carling Cup final and the play-off semi-finals before losing to West Ham. Since then, he’s won promotion from the Championship in a dominant fashion & made an impressive start to life in the premiership, with a derby win against our bitter rivals Swansea City last weekend, as the icing on the cake!
Malky’s Job Safe?
One of the safest managers in the premiership then? Sadly, seemingly not.. Bizarrely, it appears that the only people who cannot see what a fantastic job Malky Mackay is doing, is the man who matters – Vincent Tan. He stoked the fire this weekend after the Swansea result, when he told reporters “No comment” on questions about Mackay’s future. Relations between the owner and the manager appear to be rather strained, not helped by the fact that Tan inexplicably replaced his right-hand man, Iain Moody, with an unknown family friend who has no footballing experience. More rumours surfaced during the last week that Tan likes to get involved in team affairs, with the shocking suggestion that Etien Velikonja was signed above Mackay’s head, which probably would explain why he hardly ever featured!
Fans have since publicly backed Mackay, giving him a standing ovation at every game since Moody’s departure. There is a unique bond between the supporters and Mackay that hasn’t been seen at Cardiff since the days of Eddie May. There is no doubt that the fans are on the side of Malky Mackay and a small, yet significant number of supporters are even calling for Tan to leave, despite him helping deliver premiership football to the capital. After the game on Sunday, there was a “sit-in” protest in the Canton stand, which was against the regime & calling for a return to traditional blue strip. The club tried to silence the protest by switching off the floodlights, but this had the opposite effect & effectively gave it even more exposure.
Swans Silenced
On the pitch, the team Malky has assembled continued to impress, with one of Malky’s key summer signings, Steven Caulker, getting the winner against bitter rivals Swansea, to leap up to 12th in the table with 12 points after 10 games. The points were really vital as the club have some extremely tough fixtures this month, a trip to Villa this Saturday is followed by visits to the CCS from Manchester United & Arsenal in quick succession.
The clash between Cardiff and Swansea was suggested by many as a clash of different footballing philosophies, but for all of their simple passes between the back four and the goalkeeper, Swansea showed little going forward & were as guilty of “hoofball”, especially when Bony came on- despite their fans often lambasting Cardiff for playing in this style. On the day, the team that wanted it more showed through & nobody could really argue – Cardiff were by far the better team in the 2nd half, with Gary Medel running the show from midfield.
Villa Away
Both teams will look at this fixture on Saturday as one that they can get 3 points from. Cardiff, however, are on good form and will look again to claim three points, with points from the rest of November looking a lot harder to come by.
Aston Villa 1 – 2 Cardiff City.
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