The 25/26 campaign kicks off very early in August, so, with our final match of 24/25 played on 3 May at Norwich and things starting up again on 2 August, I make that a ninety one day gap between competitive fixtures for City. Yesterday, we were forty days into that ninety one day period and so you can say that the close season was something like forty five per cent over before Cardiff City were seen to be making meaningful preparations for the coming campaign..
Usually, I have a two to three week break after our final game of a season before I start up the weekly review posts in which I try to catalogue all of the things that have been announced in preparation for the coming campaign. I throw in a bit of transfer speculation as well and, invariably I end up wiith a fairly long piece that, hopefully, contains at least a few items of interest for City fans.
Well, this year the weekly reviews still haven’t started because, apart from news of a training week in Murcia and a behind closed doors friendly with Cambridge United, there’s been nothing concrete to report so far. All I’ve been able to do are a few speculative pieces about our search for a new manager which, invariably, end up being critical of the club and, in particular, the people who run it.
Finally, it felt like things started moving yesterday after a start to the week which seemed like the club were back to square one in their attempts to replace Omer Riza following the news that Aaron Ramsey was likely to move to Mexican side Pumas.
Maybe square one is over dramatising things somewhat. The situation seemed to be that the job was Des Buckingham’s, if he wanted it. The former Oxford United manager was generally thought to be the front runner out of the three candidates left on the list of five who had not, in one way or another, turned the job down yet. The list of five being what the group put together by the club hierarchy to advise on the new manager selection had compiled for them.
As for the other two out of the three, Ian Evatt was almost a forgotten man, while Brian Barry-Murphy was still hovering at pretty short odds in any bookies’ lists of candidates for the job, but there was nothing to suggest that, in reality, he was still in the running. .
The situation changed on Wednesday when the Daily Mail reported that Barry-Murphy was in “advanced talks” with Cardiff about becoming their new manager. By Thursday, it seemed pretty clear that there was something to this story and it was being said that the hold up in confirming the appointment of the new manager was down to a need for a resolution of one or two minor issues with Barry-Murphy’s current employers (he’s Assistant Manager at Leicester City). By the afternoon Sky Sports were reporting that the way had been cleared for Barry- Murphy to join Cardiff and the fact that the club started releasing what I’ll call typical close season fare, which we’d not seen anything of yet, for the rest of the day strongly suggested that Sky had got it right..
God willing, the confirmation of Brian Barry-Murphy as our new manager will come later today, but given that our owner is a superstitious man and today is Friday 13th, it might be that we’ll have to wait a few days more. It also has to be said that, this being Cardiff City, there’s still the chance of a cock up somewhere along the line that will mean we have to move on from a third candidate we’d wanted to employ.*
Barry-Murphy is portrayed as a young track suit manager with his strong points being youth development and a devotion to playing football ‘the right way’.
The reality is a little different though. At forty six, he’s in the upper levels of what can qualify as a young manager and I was interested to hear him say in one of the two podcast interviews** with him that I listened to yesterday that he went too far in his insistence on his Rochdale team having possession of the ball for the majority of the time in matches.
From what I can gather, Barry-Murphy was pretty popular with Rochdale fans despite them being relegated in his final season with them. If there was a criticism of him, it came from his team playing lots of backwards and sideways football in areas of the pitch where they weren’t hurting the opposition and a 6-0 defeat at Peterborough where Rochdale had around 70 per cent of the ball was mentioned as being a case in point.
Certainly, mentions of backwards and sideways passing puts me in mind of City’s indeterminate and pointless possession as they tried to make the transition into a more possession based team over the past two seasons and, as someone who is quite excited by the thought of someone like Barry-Murphy as our manager, the thought of more of that brand of passing football was a sobering one.
However, Barry-Murphy himself said in the podcast made after he’d left Rochdale that he’d spent too much time being being a devotee of an approach which he now used the term ‘possession for possession’s sake” about. It sounded like he was almost evangelical about the way he played at Rochdale in a similar way to how his friend and now Rangers manager Russell Martin comes across as, but, interestingly, he cited his time at Manchester City and the influence of Pep Guardiola as a reason for something of a change in his approach.
Barry-Murphy pointed out that Guardiola was all in favour of his goalkeepers passing downfield to their striker when the opportunity presented itself and he spoke about how working with very talented young forward players at Man City had made him believe that you have to get the ball to your attacking match winners much more quickly. We didn’t have many attacking match winners at Championship level, but we were nearly always guilty of taking too long to get the ball to our better forward players.
Therefore, it would seem that Barry-Murphy is a, slightly, changed man in. terms of the football he wants to play, but, apparently, the emphasis on youth development remains with it being reported locally that it was the prospect of working with the crop of particularly promising young players, by Cardiff standards, that we have coming through which led to his interest in the City job. You’d also like to think that players such as Yousef Salech and Alex Robertson (who I assume worked with Barry-Murphy at Manchester City) can develop further under his coaching.
I wrote on the messageboard I use yesterday that, despite his relegation at Rochdale, it was overly simplistic to say that Brian Barry-Murphy had failed there. After all, the club’s rapid descent into the National League, from which they’ve not yet returned, in the second season after he left suggests that he was hard to replace there. Also, given that Manchester City employed him at a time when he only had his spell at Rochdale to offer on his managerial CV,it rather suggests that they saw something special in him.
No, I’m fairly optimistic about this appointment in terms of what it may give us on the coaching and youth development side of things and I’d like to think that Barry-Murphy’s Man City connections and the reputation he got himself for doing good work with higher league loanees while at Rochdale will stand us in good stead when it comes to that aspect of player recruitment.
However, while Barry-Murphy may not be as young as many might think, he’s inexperienced at working with football club owners, particularly football club owners like Vincent Tan. Therefore, I still maintain that, at least as important as the person we choose as our new manager is, setting up of what most clubs would call a normal football structure with specialists filling positions – as opposed to part time Chairmen from Monaco and a car salesman who spends half his time in London.
Brian Barry-Murphy is a fascinating appointment and I think he has the potential to take us on to better times than we’re experiencing now. However, if it’s going to be a case of him working directly to Messrs Choo, Dalman and, especially, Tan, I can see him going the same way as the rest of our managers since our previous relegation in 2019.
On to yesterday’s other developments, City had been the only EFL club not to publicly release their retained list until this appeared on their website in the afternoon and, after such a long wait for it to appear, it was a bit of anti climax really.
The Aaron Ramsey news had been clearly signposted and, sadly because we’re talking about my favourite Premier League player here, it’s a decision which cannot be criticised really given how little time he spent on the pitch for us. As for the other senior players being released, I can’t make a convincing case for any of them staying and the surprises, if they can be called that, when it comes to senior players are the ones involving Andy Rinomhota and Joe Ralls.
The first named will be someone who you’d like to think can be effective in League One and there was a time when you’d have definitely said the same about Ralls, but it feels like he’s at a stage in his career where he’ll only play about half of the games and it seems like the contract offer to him is as much recognition for the sort of influence he can be around the place as anything else.
Among the younger players, I’m pleased, and a little surprised, by one or two who have been given pro deals and think it’s somewhat harsh to let Freddie Cook go, while Cole Fleming deserves sympathy when you consider he spent so long out injured last season.
There was also confirmation of a second pre season match – this will be on Tuesday 15 July at Yeovil, three days before the behind closed doors match with Cambridge United.
*this was written on the morning of Friday 13 June and the day ended without confirmation of Brian Barry-Murphy’s appointment. However, there was a media report that Lee Riley, who was Barry-Murphy’s Assistant-Manager at Rochdale and is an Academy Coach and a “Talent ID scout” at Manchester City had agreed to join him at Cardiff.
** One of the podcasts referred to can be listened to here, while a pretty recent article on him by the Athletic is here (it’s behind a paywall, but I was able to read it without paying by enrolling as a member).