Oh Mick, You’ve really gone and done it now. Where do we go from here?
It beggars belief that he looked at the Blackburn game and reasoned that what this increasingly dire situation required was more centre backs. At a time when everyone was crying out for less defenders and more midfielders, he went one further by instead culling all his full backs. A penny for the thoughts of the players right now.
Five centre back will now surely enter the Cardiff City lexicon. You think this is bad, well its not five centre backs. The problem is that five centre backs is not just a tactical decision, it’s a state of mind. A statement of intent. If you build a wall of burly bouncers across your defence, it is an expression of fear. Of both the current situation and your opponent.
When you then go a goal down after five minutes, your plans go out the window. When that plan is ultra-negative and almost baiting your own supporters, you’ve not only snookered yourself, but the mood also takes a turn for the worse.
Would supporters still have turned on Mick had his selection been bolder and well intentioned? Maybe, but that never happened and now here we are. There is rarely a way back from this.
How did it come to this though? No one could have predicted such a steep downturn in fortunes. Five weeks ago, Cardiff were comfortably seeing off Millwall, a result that took them in to the play off places. Even two weeks ago they were clawing their way back to win at Nottingham Forest. It felt like a turning point, but little did we know what kind of turn.
Over the next four games, Cardiff’s season has imploded and they’ve tumbled down the table. They currently occupy 16th and could drop as low as 20th by the weekend. Cardiff sacked Neil Harris when they dropped to 15th after a run of six defeats and Warnock departed with Cardiff in 14th.
I thought Harris was going to get the sack on a few occasions before he finally did and I expect that he did too. Maybe that was Cardiff showing admirable patience, or maybe Harris benefitted from playing behind closed doors and the crowd never had the chance to turn on him publicly.
People also liked Harris and they loved Warnock. McCarthy has not nurtured a bond with Cardiff supporters. He is spiky in press conferences and does not acknowledge them after games. You reap what you sow in this regard, so there was very little warmth there even before results took a turn for the worse.
There is a home game against Reading at the weekend, which I am already dreading, before the international break. It remains to be seen if McCarthy will last that long, but if he does, there is a lot riding on it. He surely won’t survive another hammering and this is the point in the season when owners get itchy trigger fingers. Should he remain in situ, Swansea await for the first game back.
There are lots of factors at play here. Does anyone deserve to lose their job after four bad games, however bad? On the other hand, this run is hardly a surprise and you could argue that Cardiff were previously riding their luck. The squad was fatally undermined in the summer and should McCarthy carry the can for that? Also, can the club afford to sack him, even if they want to?
Eventually though, it all comes back to the feels and it all feels wrong. The team, the club, all of it. Managers will come and managers will go, but we’ve been here before and are no further down the line. If anything, the club is a little worse off every time. Warnock had a transformative effect because he managed the club as well as the team. That was beyond his remit, but you have to at Cardiff because it is a club in need of a saviour.
Suffice to say, McCarthy was never Cardiff’s saviour. He was a safe pair of hands to correct their gamble with a younger manager and initially exceeded all expectations. He deserved his new deal, despite the claims of some in retrospect.
Would someone like Steve Morison do any better? Who knows. He would certainly carry on the bizarre sequence of replacing an older manager with a younger one and vice versa, but most importantly, he would be something different. Something else, and that tends to be all that counts in these situations.
Some clubs have these things all planned out and upsize. Cardiff just react and flounder. It is impossible to know what happens next because I very much doubt that the club have given it much thought yet. In the meantime, we have five centre backs and you really couldn’t make it up.