Baggies need to recover the winning feeling against Cardiff

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·25 ottobre 2024

Baggies need to recover the winning feeling against Cardiff

West Bromwich Albion v Cardiff City; The Hawthorns, Saturday 26th October, 3pm

After five games without a win, the Baggies return to the Hawthorns on Saturday knowing that three points is vital to keep them in the midst of the promotion battle. Three below par performances were followed by two more encouraging displays on the road, but with neither resulting in victory, sending the Bluebirds home pointless is increasingly important.

Of course, labelling any game as a “must-win” at this stage of the season is somewhat ridiculous. While we may be in the midst of Corberán’s worst ever run of results as Baggies boss, but there is no sense of crisis. Obviously, the longer the winless run goes on, the louder the questions will become, but the Spaniard has plenty of credit in the bank.

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Albion just about edged the game at Blackburn on Wednesday, and a point away to a side defending a 100% home record can only be a good result. It was the visitors who had the better of the chances, with two in the first half unfortunately falling to full backs. In hindsight, it’s easy to criticise the finishes – Furlong should probably have gone for the near post and Heggem may have been better passing to Maja given the number of people in front of him, but they were both decent attempts given the circumstances and it would be churlish to decry their efforts too much. Similarly, Karlan Grant’s effort in the second half was creditable, even if the TV’s summariser, Andy Walker (yeah, I’d never heard of him either), was scathing of all three players. One individual who did deserve criticism was the referee, John Busby, for not awarding what seemed like a clear penalty against Furlong in the second half.

The Baggies could easily have won their last three games, they certainly deserved to win at least two of them, and they would sitting joint top of the table with Sunderland. As it is, they are still in the mix in fourth place and with a great chance to get back to winning ways against Cardiff City.

The Bluebirds had a dreadful start to the season picking up just one point, away to arch rivals Swansea City, in their first seven league games of the season. Manager, Erol Bulut, was sacked six games into that run and interim boss, Omer Riza, has engineered something of a turnaround. After losing his first game in charge 4-1 at Hull City, he has guided City to three home wins and one draw away to Bristol City to lift the club out of the bottom three. They have scored seven goals without reply in their last two games, with former Baggie, Callum Robinson, scoring three of them, so they will be full of confidence as they travel to the Hawthorns.

Riza, a London-born coach of Turkish-Cypriot descent, is staking his claim to get the job on a permanent basis – prior to joining the coaching staff at Cardiff in the summer, his previous role was as assistant to former Albion boss, Valérien Ismaël, at Watford – his only previous experience as a head coach in the Football League was a brief spell at Leyton Orient in 2017.

It seems likely that Corberán will, once again, be without Kyle Bartley who picked up an injury in training on Tuesday, so I expect Paddy McNair to continue in the back four. I thought McNair did OK at Blackburn – he read the game well as you would expect from a player of his experience, although I did feel that he looked a little vulnerable under the high ball. In his first game as skipper, I thought Furlong was excellent on Wednesday and, despite a few heart-attack moments from Semi Ajayi, I would expect the back four to be unchanged for Saturday’s match.

Corberán’s preference to keep the defence unchanged has left Frabotta and Styles as bit-part players with a few late cameos – Heggem’s performances at left back have merited his continued inclusion and the one time that we did see him in the centre of defence, when Ajayi was withdrawn for the latter stages at Hillsborough, Albion ended up conceding a poor goal, although it not is necessarily indicative of his or Frabotta’s abilities in those positions.

I would assume that Karlan Grant will be looking forward to playing against the side he was on loan at last season, and he gave the manager no reason to drop him in his performance at Blackburn. Tom Fellows, on the other hand, has been a peripheral figure in recent games and I feel he is losing a little bit of confidence. I think that his early season form (he remains joint top of the Championship assists table with five) has seen opposing managers put a special plan in place for him, and he needs to learn how to counter that attention – I would persist with him for the time being.

Having said that, I thought there were flashes from Mikey Johnston at Blackburn of the player we saw in the first few months of the year – the more direct running approach that defenders hate. It’s probably the first time that I’ve felt he’d had an impact off the bench and, if nothing else, it bodes well for the coming weeks. If he does get another chance from the start against Cardiff, he needs to do better than he did against Millwall.

Essentially, Albion fans want to see three points with some of the quick attacking football we saw in the early stages of the season. The one positive of Cardiff’s return to form may be that they are less likely to park the bus, which will hopefully lead to a better spectacle than the last game at the Hawthorns.

History

The Baggies are on an unbeaten run of six in their meetings with Cardiff City, and the Bluebirds haven’t won at the Hawthorns on their last six visits – their last win at Albion was 2-0 in the Championship in December 2009. Corberán’s team completed a league double over Cardiff last season.

Cardiff City has played home for a number of Baggies in recent years with many players heading to the Welsh capital on loan from Albion, not least current Bluebirds forward, Callum Robinson, who made a permanent move in 2022 after a loan spell a couple of years earlier. Cédric Kipré spent the 2022/23 season on loan in south Wales before returning to be the Baggies’ player of the season for the following campaign, while Karlan Grant spent last season at the Cardiff City and is now back at Albion and fully in the first team picture.

The only other member of the current Baggies squad to have spent time at Cardiff is Semi Ajayi, but his move from Arsenal as a youngster, initially on loan, failed to result in any first team appearances. Another product of the Arsenal academy, Chris Willock, was on loan at the Hawthorns in 2019/20 but failed to make an appearance for the Baggies before having his revenge when he scored for Huddersfield Town against Albion late in the season. He moved to Cardiff this summer from QPR.

A few well-known strikers had spells with both clubs. Rob Earnshaw was a legend at Ninian Park before moving the Hawthorns in 2004 and, when he bagged three against Charlton the following spring, he became the first footballer to have scored a hat-trick in all four divisions and at international level. Nine years later, Peter Odemwingie made the move in the opposite direction, as did Rickie Lambert in 2016 after a somewhat underwhelming season at the Hawthorns. A decade before that, the late, great Kevin Campbell made what proved to be the last move of his professional career when he moved from the Hawthorns to Ninian Park in the summer of 2006.

A couple of other strikers that Baggies fans might prefer to forget have links with the Bluebirds – Ken Zohore, one of the most unsuccessful signings of recent years, moved to Albion from Cardiff in 2019 while Jordan Hugill had a marginally more successful loan spell at Cardiff after his forgettable spell at Albion, both from Norwich City in the 2021/22 campaign.

Staying with strikers, Garry Thompson spent two seasons at Cardiff in the 1990s and one of the Baggies’ best inside forwards, Johnny Nicholls, moved to Ninian Park when he left the Hawthorns in 1957.

A regular on our TV screens these days, Danny Gabbidon, went on loan from the Hawthorns to Cardiff in 2000, eventually making the move permanent and spending five years in the Welsh capital. Jason Koumas had two loan spells in Cardiff, one from Albion in 2005 and another from Wigan five years later while another four veterans of the Great Escape campaign had spells with Cardiff – Darren Purse moved to Ninian Park in the summer of 2005, Riccy Scimeca followed him in January 2006 and Kieran Richardson finished his career with the Bluebirds in 2017. Meanwhile, Junichi Inamoto went on loan to Cardiff in December 2004 and returned to the Hawthorns to play a minor role in the final few games of the season.

A few others to have played for both clubs include Kevin Bartlett, Stacy Caldicott, James Chambers, Wayne Fereday, Steve Lynex, Mick Martin, Lee Peltier, Romaine Sawyers, Gabriel Tamaș and Andy Thompson.