West Ham laughed loudest with Cardiff City transfer - Bluebirds spared their blushes | OneFootball

Nicky Maynard played a role in getting West Ham back into the Premier League, but his move to Cardiff turned out to be a disaster for the Bluebirds.

West Ham United's signing of Nicky Maynard in January 2012 didn't go according to plan, but they'd at least get their money back from his sale to Cardiff City, while all the Bluebirds would get from him would be injuries.

The 31st January 2012 was a mixed day for West Ham United. On the one hand, the team lost 5-1 to Ipswich in the Championship, a defeat which turned out to be their heaviest of the season. But on the other hand, they had a new signing to announce, with the acquisition of a striker who'd been doing well with Bristol City in the Championship over the previous four years.

But Nicky Maynard didn't turn out to be the hit that the Irons had hoped that he would be. Upon West Ham's return to the top-flight at the end of the 2011-12 season, he was sold on to Cardiff City without getting onto the pitch in the Premier League for the team he'd helped to get there.

And when he went to Cardiff, injury issues which had been evident earlier in his career came back to haunt him and, having even made a small profit on what they'd paid for him in the first place, it would be West Ham who had the last laugh over a transfer that never quite worked out.

There was an injury warning in the career history of Nicky Maynard when West Ham signed him

Maynard signed for West Ham from Bristol City for £2 million at the end of the January transfer window, but there had been a warning sign earlier in his career at Ashton Gate about the injury problems to come.

Signed from Crewe Alexandra in 2008, Maynard had scored 20 League goals for the Robins in the Championship in the 2009-10 season, but a knee injury just before the start of the 2010-11 season meant that he didn't make his first appearance that season until February 2011.

At the end of that season, Bristol City fought off attempts to wrestle him away from Ashton Gate from Leicester City, Nottingham Forest and Southampton, but with contract negotiations stalling and the clock ticking before he became a free agent, Bristol City decided to cash in and sell him on at the end of the 2011-12 January window.

West Ham may have been beaten 5-1 by Ipswich that day, but they were still two points clear at the top of the Championship table. They weren't by the end of the season. By the time they'd played their 46 games, they'd slipped to third in the table behind Reading and Southampton despite only losing one more match after the Ipswich defeat.

The killer blow for their automatic promotion hopes came in March, when they drew five successive matches, dropping ten points. They ended up two points short of Southampton in third place and had to settle for the play-offs. Maynard had started reasonably well for the Irons, with a goal and an assist, but from there on the goals largely dried up, and he only added one more of each in the regular season.

West Ham won their play-off semi-final against Cardiff City comfortably, winning 2-0 in Cardiff and then finishing the job with a 3-0 win at The Boleyn Ground in the second leg, with Maynard coming off the bench to score West Ham's third goal and secure a 5-0 aggregate win. For all this, though, Maynard couldn't get on the pitch for the play-off final, which ended in a 2-1 win for West Ham against Blackpool.

Injuries meant that Cardiff City never saw the best of Nicky Maynard

Maynard started the season on the bench at West Ham, missing out on the first two games of their season against Aston Villa, but three days later he was picked for their League Cup game against Crewe Alexandra in a 2-0 win. But this didn't just turn out to be his last goal for West Ham; it was his last appearance for them, too. Three days later he was sold to Cardiff City for £2.5 million.

But three weeks after his arrival at Cardiff came the first of a series of injuries when, after providing two assists in his first three games in a Bluebirds shirt, he tore his ACL and was out for practically the entire remainder of the 2012-13 season, returning for a six-minute cameo appearance as a substitute on the final weekend of the season in which he still managed to score a stoppage-time equaliser from the penalty spot against Hull City. The draw secured Hull a place in the Premier League, but Cardiff were already up as Champions.

Following promotion, though, Maynard was unable to tie down a place in the Cardiff first team. He made eight appearances for the Bluebirds in the top-flight, all of them coming from the bench. The 121 minutes he'd play from the bench for Cardiff that season turned out to be the only Premier League football of his career.

In January 2014 he found himself back in the Championship, this time with Wigan Athletic, who took him on loan. But the goals didn't flow, and Maynard only scored four in 17 as the Latics finished in a play-off place before losing their semi-final over two legs to Queens Park Rangers.

Back in Cardiff for the start of the 2014-15 after they were relegated straight back to the Championship at the first attempt, Maynard started pretty well, scoring in two of his first League appearances of the season and adding a third in their first League Cup game of the season at Accrington Stanley.

But bad luck struck again, and in November he was laid out for the remainder of the season with a back injury. His goal turned out to be his last for the club. The £2.5 million that Cardiff City had spent on Maynard had yielded 26 appearances and three goals. He went on to play for Milton Keynes, Aberdeen, Bury, Mansfield Town, Newport County and Tranmere Rovers before dropping into the non-league game, playing for Macclesfield and Winsford Town before retiring in 2023.

It would be a stretch to say that Maynard was a 'failure' at West Ham United or Cardiff City. He played a role in getting West Ham back into the Premier League, while his time at Cardiff was affected by a horrendous bad run of injuries.

But in turning a small profit on a player who only played a few games for them, and who went on to have such a disrupted time of things at Cardiff, it's reasonable to say that Irons had the last laugh over that particular bit of transfer business.