Saturday, February 20, 2010

Grim: City 0-2 Barnsley

I don't know what to say. I really don't. I know City are struggling to find 11 fit players to put out on the park, but the ones that are there just aren't showing the quality (or rather any quality).

Our defence is a shambles, there's no midfield to speak of, Chopra couldn't score if you put the ball on the goal line in front of him with no defenders or keeper, and our one fit keeper can't kick a ball to save his life.

Barnsley are a mediocre side and came to Cardiff on the back of three straight losses. In the first 5 minutes City were all over them like a rash, and Chopra scoped the ball about 10 yards over the bar from 4 yards out. That should have told us it wasn't going to be our day.

We were then undone by two through balls that split our defence - well perhaps split is too generous - they (our alleged central defenders) never even looked as if they were on the same park, and Bogdanovich, that well known Maltese striker showed Chopra how it should be done with two clinical finishes three minutes apart. Twelve minutes in and we're two down. Their confidence went sky high, we looked more jittery than a team who's looked very jittery for several weeks, and so that was that.

In mitigation, the ref who was about 3ft 2" high got in the way of two great passes from our boys that night have opened something up, we played marginally better in the second half, and ha a five minutes spell where the pressure on the Bransley goal was intense. But we missed a header from a yard, hit the bar and generally didn't score. Not the way to win a football match.

Even Dave Jones summary has moved on from the "we've got injuries all over the park and we're all in need of a rest" to a more pragmatic "We've not really played well". Yeah, Dave, we didn't. It was crap. Again.

But, miraculously we're still fifth.

What makes it even worse is Swansea are now fourth, and even if we win our game in hand we'll still be a point behind them.

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