Cardiff 2 Forest 0 – high flying Bluebirds halt the Forest

By: Tim | February 1st, 2009

Garner has a shot on goal early in the second half Like Forest’s 42-match unbeaten run in the 70s, all good things must come to an end. We couldn’t expect our recent run of good form to last forever really, not with our record against teams from the top half of the table anyway – we’ve only beaten one team from there (Crystal Palace) way back in October. Cardiff are serious promotion candidates too, they’re now unbeaten in 13 matches and have a game in hand over the other teams in the top 10.

The result aside, I think we acquitted ourselves well in this match though. This is the kind of game we would have lost badly under Calderwood, so it shows how far we’ve come under Davies in such a short space of time. Dave Jones described it as ‘a hard-earned battle but a well-earned three points’, we might have ended up with a better result had we not been sluggish in the first half.

It took us half an hour to record a shot on goal, and even that was a tame header from McGugan, but by that time Cardiff were already one up and had come close with another chance. Bothroyd had a few chances late in the first half, and had it not been for some great last ditch defending from Wes Morgan, McCormack could have put the Bluebirds two up when he was clean through on goal.

In the second half Garner came on to replace McCleary, and we switched to two up front. We looked stronger for it too, McGugan and Tyson both having early chances, sadly neither had their shooting boots on. Tyson did put the ball in the net later on, but the referee ruled it out for a foul. Bothroyd finally wrapped up the points for Cardiff late on in the game, after running at our defence, and turning Breckin inside out, he placed a curling shot in to the far corner.

Davies continued his ‘we’ve got a young squad’ shtick after the match: ‘It was 11 against six in the first half. We tried to change things around to get a bit more out of certain players, but that wasn’t happening. What we have got is young players who are inconsistent in their performances. Young players cannot handle playing this amount of games in a short period of time’. He’s right really, given the current injury crisis we do need to bolster the squad with some experience.

Although Davies has repeatedly said that he doesn’t want to rush in to the transfer market, he has also said that he wants to bring in a couple of players before the 5pm deadline on Monday. Mark Arthur has recently said that we’ve made 4 written offers for players, some of which have been rejected, others are in negotiation. Who they are I don’t know, the messageboards are quiet too. Either way we need to boost the squad with high quality players, especially considering the next seven out of eight league games are against teams from the top half of the table.