Tag: Cardiff City

It was, considering everything, not the most earth-shattering news of the season that we’ve seen so far, but the decision of the owner of Cardiff City Football Club to relieve Malky Mackay of his position as manager of the club still seems likely to further sour the atmosphere at The Cardiff City Stadium in the near future. A first season back in the Premier League for a little over half a century and the opportunity to resume hostilities against rivals Swansea City should really have been a cause for considerable celebration on the part of the club’s supporters, but it certainly feels as if the experience of Cardiff City of supporters so far this season has been significantly tainted by the autocratic nature of the behaviour of the club’s owner, Vincent Tan. On the surface, though, it’s worth mentioning in the interests of balance that there was an arguable case for changing the manager of the club at this stage of the season. Cardiff have won just two Premier League matches since the end of September and sit just one point above the relegation places at the time of writing. The harsh truth of the matter is that, in the current hire ’em and fire’ em environment of the Premier League at the moment, managers have been sacked for less. And it is also worth pointing out that, with...

It was, perhaps, unsurprising that barely forty-eight hours after a one-nil victory against West Bromwich Albion at the weekend ended a run of five matches without a win, storm clouds should start to circle The Cardiff City Stadium again. There has, after all, been something of a fractious atmosphere surrounding the club over the last few months or so, and even elevation into the Premier League hasn’t quite allowed us to shake off the feeling that something isn’t quite right behind the scenes at the club. This feeling of disquiet began, of course, with the rebranding of the club in red and black and the debasement of its badge, but the current feeling of unhappiness at the club has more to do with backroom politics than colours and identity. One might expect that Malky McKay, the manager who guided the club into the top division of the English league system for the first time since 1962, would be pretty much universally popular amongst the people of Cardiff at the moment. There may be an element of truth in this – although it is worth pointing out that, these days, there are very, very few managers who enjoy anything like a universality of popularity amongst supporters – but the man upon whose opinion McKay’s continuing employment at the club ultimately rests is not from Cardiff. He’s from Malaysia and, we...

Tomorrow afternoon at The Cardiff City Stadium, Cardiff City will play Swansea City for the first time in the top division of English football, and from the outside it looks more than a little as if this match might be a be all and end all. Peering in from the outside, it’s not difficult to believe that there has been a something of a sense of “keeping up with the Joneses” about Cardiff’s ownership under Vincent Tan, that parity with the hated “Jacks” was worth the changing of the colours, the changing of the flags and the apparent autocracy that now runs the club with an increasingly worryingly hands-on approach. The battle of the colours of the club has been lost. Perhaps there were too many for whom the blue shirts didn’t matter enough in comparison with being where the perceived action is, in the Premier League. Perhaps there were too many relative newcomers, for whom history meant little in comparison with the ability to puff one’s chest out and say, “We are Premier League.” It’s now difficult to imagine the club reverting back to their traditional colours of blue and white, just as it’s difficult to imagine the very image which represented the football club itself, the iconic Bluebird, being allowed to do anything but fly away into the history books. Since the start of this season, however,...

Cardiff City are probably the best placed of the three promoted clubs to maintain their Premier League place.