Tan And Ollie
The BBC commentator on the Cardiff match at Arsenal on Match of the Day last night deliberately referred to Vincent Tan and Ole Gunnar Solskjaer as Tan and Ollie.
I was amused, but was the Cardiff City owner?
Vincent Tan Is 66-1 To Be The Next Cardiff Manager
This is according to Match of the Day.
The big question is, could he work with the owner of the club?
Real Fans Don’t Like Certain Teams
I’m a real football fan, who has followed the game probably since about the age of six or so, when my father first took me to White Hart Lane. One of the early games I saw was when Newcastle and the legend, Jackie Milburn, were visitors. I think Spurs won and I do know that Ted Ditchburn, their goalkeeper was outstanding and that Jackie Milburn missed a penalty. Other teams, I saw in the fifties and early sixties with my father, included Leeds with John Charles and Stoke City with Stanley Matthews. I watched most Cup finals of that era on the television, but the earliest I remember is probably the Manchester City v Birmingham City final of 1956, when Bert Trautmann broke his neck and Don Revie played as a deep-lying centre-forward.
my father had had a long history of both playing football and supporting Spurs. He always said, that he first went to Spurs in a pony and trap, and hisfather paid a boy to hold the horse’s head during the match. i think too, he’d been at the 1921 Cup Final.
I started going to Ipswich when my parents moved to Felixstowe. Usually, I was taken by the next door neighbour as getting between Ipswich and Felixstowe in those days wasn’t easy by public transport. As I was living in London most of the time, I still cycled to some of Spurs home matches and later at Liverpool University, I visited both Everton and Liverpool and quite a lot of teams in the area, including Manchester United, Preston, Leeds, Blackpool, Blackburn and Burnley. I didn’t carry a camera as I do now, so there is no record of the visits to the old grounds. Some were very rudimentary and far inferior to how they are today. I remember that getting to Old Trafford involved getting a steam powered shuttle train from the centre of Manchester. I think this was probably, when I took the train from Huyton.
Over the years, I’ve developed a dislike of certain teams. I won’t mention them all, but the usual suspects are there.
This last few weeks, I’ve been watching the story unfold at Cardiff City. I don’t like bullies and I very much feel that the club, the fans and the manager have been very badly treated.
So I felt quite a bit of delight, when Sunderland scored their second goal tonight at Cardiff.
To not win couldn’t have happened to a more deserving owner!
Vincent Tan Was Right
Yesterday, Cardiff City played in their traditional blue colours against Liverpool. So Vincent Tan is in some ways right, as Cardiff lost badly. Obviously, the shirts are not lucky, like red ones are.
There was a joke going Portman Road yesterday, that Mick McCarthy had been asked to be the next Cardiff manager. Apparently, he’d told Vincent Tan in his most polite Yorkshire-Irish way, that he wasn’t interested in the job.
Bonkers Management
Not my phrase, but that of Rachel Burden on BBC Radio 5 to describe the style of management at Cardiff City, under the ownership of Vincent Tan.
I do wonder how some of these people made their money, as in my view you can’t make money without having some skill or sense. I wonder if you read his entry on Wikipedia, you’ll come to the same conclusions as I have.
Cardiff City To Change Colours
It would appear that the new Malaysian owners of Cardiff City are going to change the teams colours from blue to red, as reported here.
To my mind Cardiff City are one of those teams that don’t play in distinctive or unusual colours like Blackpool, Blackburn Rovers, Norwich City or QPR, so in some ways to change from one common colour to another is very strange.
Does it show that the new owners don’t understand football at all? If so, Cardiff City are on a steep slope to oblivion. Especially, as changing colours will alienate a large percentage of the fans. Are they going to buy new shirts? I doubt it!
Time will tell on this, but I think it’s a bit of a disaster.
The Anonymous Widower 