This time last year, Rob Edwards was briefly celebrating winning the League Two championship with his swashbuckling Forest Green Rovers side. I say briefly because four days later, he had been poached by Watford, who were plotting a swift return to the Premier League. Edwards, a former Welsh international, was one of the hottest prospects in his field, yet he only lasted 138 days, as Watford did as Watford does.
Meanwhile, Cardiff were abandoning their rebuild under Steve Morison at the first sign of danger and sacked him the week before Edwards was dismissed. Mark Hudson stepped up to fill the void and Edwards was available for two months before Luton picked him up. Cardiff now tend to take the path of least, and cheapest, resistance when it comes to managers, but Edwards presented them with a golden opportunity.
Watford paid six months of his Forest Green salary to buy him out of his contract, the sort of outlay Cardiff would never countenance, but he was four months later as free as a bird. There is no suggestion that Cardiff made any enquiries about Edwards, but he would surely have jumped at the chance to manage in the Welsh capital. This is not just revisionism based on his second successive promotion, sealed yesterday with Luton, as plenty were arguing his case at the time. He is Welsh, after all, which brings me on to Cardiff’s latest managerial search and Nathan Jones.
Full disclosure, I have serious reservations about Jones. He’s like a nervous breakdown on legs, chewing his fingernails down to his elbows on the touchline. He’s always aggrieved about something and has a tendency to put his foot right in it. In his early days at Luton, when he felt that their table tennis table was becoming too great a distraction, he took it outside and burned it. I can’t imagine that any of this would play particularly well with Vincent Tan, but his record of overachieving certainly would.
Southampton also saw fit to spend up to a reported £4m to buy him out of his Luton contract, ahead of a disastrous spell that lasted a mere 94 days, and he was lucky to last that long. As Edwards has shown, a failure on your record does not make you a bad manager and a bit of faith can reap rather large rewards.
Jones has moved mountains with Luton, but tanked really badly at both Southampton and Stoke. His once red-hot reputation is now rather lukewarm and he needs somewhere to revive his career. Cardiff has proven a graveyard for managers in recent years, but the bar is set unbelievably low and who knows, maybe they would be good for each other.
Rightly or wrongly, there is always a thirst for Cardiff to hire a Welsh manager and Jones, who hails from Blaenrhondda, is also a Cardiff fan. It has also not gone unnoticed that he also has a rather good record against Swansea and has in the past taken great joy at beating them.
At a time when Cardiff cannot afford to be without a manager, it’s now two weeks since Sabri Lamouchi departed and three weeks since their last game. Activity, communication and even speculation has been thin on the ground ever since. For a club that replaces their manager so regularly, it boggles the mind that they’re always unprepared when its time to find a new one.
Who knows what will happen next, but they literally have a manager they couldn’t ordinarily afford on their doorstep. The problem Cardiff now have is that whoever they bring in will be compared against Lamouchi, who most wanted to stay, and Jones, who is still available. That’s a relatively high bar and there will be no credible way to explain away another cut price appointment.
After such a tortuous season, supporters need something to believe in and a statement of intent. While they remain under a transfer ban, a manager is just about all they can shell out on, but that lack of influence in the transfer market will likely put off most credible candidates.
If they can attract Jones, they would be lucky to have him, but he doesn’t even appear to be in the conversation. As always, Cardiff need a hero and were Jones to join, it might all end terribly, but he could also prove to be the hero they always so desperately need. It would at least give everyone a lift, as it could be far worse and Jones has always said that he would never turn Cardiff down. Maybe its time to put that claim to the test.