As Roman Abramovitch will attest, picking a team can be tough work. So spare a thought for Cardiff boss Dave Jones and his thread bare squad, who, after a home draw with Preston, was quoted on the BBC site saying:
“At the moment we’re trying to put one or two square pegs in round holes.”
Let’s just have a look at those square pegs for a minute Dave, do they include Robbie Fowler, Jimmy Floyd-Hasselbaink and Trevor Sinclair? How bad can it be? At Cardiff, worse than you’d imagine.
Fowler bagged two on Saturday and will surely fill his soon-to-be-golden boots against Championship defences this season, but it is not just clogging centre-backs that he is presenting a problem to. With Cardiff’s all-star line-up currently the Championship’s biggest media draw Jones will need to match column inches with results. So, after three home defeats, Jones was quite up-beat about the Preston result, saying:
“If we’re going to take any consolation it’s that we’ve stopped the rot here, which was becoming a little bit annoying,”
If they don’t replace the rot with a few wins and a place near the top of the table then Jones could be facing an ‘annoying’ period on gardening leave.