With the dust still to settle on a season that will always be defined by tragedy rather than relegation, the attention at Cardiff City has already turned to the future of Neil Warnock and whether the man who celebrated his 70th birthday last December wants to carry on and try to add a ninth promotion to his CV.
The answer is not as straightforward as some imagined it would be. Warnock has another season of management in him but, as his comments after the 3-2 home defeat by Crystal Palace on Saturday illustrated, it is by no means a foregone conclusion that he will be spending it with Cardiff. “I have no idea,” replied the manager when asked whether he would stay.
That has nothing to do with how Warnock feels about the club where he has formed such a strong bond with the supporters over the past three seasons, but is more a sign of tensions behind the scenes and a clear sense that the relationship with Vincent Tan, Cardiff’s owner, is not without difficulties. What Tan wants from Cardiff’s players at times, and what Warnock feels they are able to deliver, have been two different things.
It is not to say that Tan, or pretty much anyone else at Cardiff for that matter, believes Warnock should have kept them up this season. Given that Cardiff were punching well above their weight when they won promotion 12 months ago, the fact that they landed enough blows in the Premier League still to be within a chance of surviving come the penultimate weekend of the season was an achievement in itself.
Yet their limitations – and Warnock acknowledged this – were evident in the defeat by Palace that condemned them to an immediate return to the Championship. Grit, determination and spirit go a long way in this game – but only so far at the highest level. Wasteful in front of goal and defensively naive, Cardiff lacked “that little bit of quality”, according to the manager himself.
The truth is that Cardiff have spent this season playing Premier League football with a Championship squad. Indeed, it seems remarkable to think seven of the players who started in Warnock’s first game as Cardiff manager, way back in October 2016 and at a time when the club were second from bottom in the Championship and worried about slipping into League One, have been regulars this season and made close to 200 Premier League appearances between them.
Without significant investment last summer, relegation was inevitable. Cardiff spent conservatively and maybe that is no bad thing bearing in mind that Fulham were relegated after splurging £100m. There will also be no need for a major overhaul this summer. Cardiff’s biggest outlays – about £21m in total – went on Bobby Reid and Josh Murphy, two players signed from Championship clubs.
Murphy has shown flashes of real promise on the flank but lacked consistency, while Reid has arguably been under-used, with Warnock admitting that the former Bristol City striker can count himself unfortunate to have spent so much time on the bench because of the form of Victor Camarasa, who arrived on loan from Real Betis and brought a touch of class to a workmanlike team. There is an argument that Warnock could have tried harder to accommodate the two of them in the same side.
What can be said with absolute certainty is that Cardiff’s biggest weakness this season has been the absence of a proven goalscorer. Warnock thought he had found a solution to that problem when he travelled to France on 6 December to watch a rugged and experienced striker score a bullet-header for Nantes against Marseille. The player’s name was Emiliano Sala.
The rest of the story is well-documented and heartbreakingly sad. Sala, a 28-year-old Argentinian, was on board a plane that went missing over the Channel on the night of 21 January, only 48 hours after Cardiff had announced that he had become their club-record signing. His body was recovered 16 days later though the pilot, David Ibbotson, is still missing.
The impact that horrendous episode had on Cardiff’s relegation is hard to quantify and, of course, hardly of great significance in the context of families losing their sons. What we do know from a football point of view is that Warnock gave serious consideration to walking away from management in the days and weeks afterwards, and that Cardiff never came close to finding an alternative to Sala. Oumar Niasse, who joined on loan from Everton, has made 13 appearances for Cardiff and is still waiting for his first goal.
In the aftermath of relegation, Warnock reiterated his belief that Sala “would have scored the 10 goals to keep us up”. Looking at the table, and some of Cardiff’s results, four or five goals from him could well have made all the difference. Either way, there is a far more important point to all of this and Warnock made it succinctly when he spoke about the need for a sense of perspective on Saturday evening. “We’ve got relegated,” he said. “The lad lost his life.”
By Warnock’s own admission, this has been his toughest season in a managerial career spanning four decades, yet he also said that the drive and hunger is still there to “have a year somewhere” come August. It was an interesting choice of words and leaves his future as Cardiff manager hanging in the balance.
