Cardiff City news 07/03/02

Thurs 7th March 2002. Battle for the play offs

Tuesday nights draw coupled with Brighton's comfortable home win over Wycombe means that City are now fighting for a play off place. Should City have won and Brighton lost on Tuesday night then a 4 point gap would have meant the Bluebirds were still in contention for automatic promotion but the gap is now nine points and with only nine games to go it's too tall an order.

City must now work hard to ensure a play off place. It's tight with probably four, possibly six teams fighting for two places.

I think it's reasonable to expect Reading to get automatic promotion. Either Stoke or Brighton should take the second promotion spot with the other and Brentford taking the top two play off spots.

That leave Bristol City, Oldham, Huddersfield and Cardiff challenging for the other two places. Only two points seperate the four teams and cardiff have to travel away to Oldham and Huddersfield so it will not be easy.

City still have to careful with teams trying to catch up. Only two teams can now realistically look at a play off place, Q.P.R are 3 points behind City, four off the last play off place but they have only 8 games to go. Tranmere, one below Rangers, have ten games to go, they have a game in hand on City and are 5 points off the play off places. Ominously City's last game of the season is at Tranmere and they have course just signed Simon Howarth after City lket the chance slip by. The script is already written, you do not need to use too much imagination to see Haworth scoring the goal that keeps us in division 2.

Lennie Lawrence has accepted that the play offs are our best hope

"The tiny, tiny chance we had of making second place has now disappeared.

"Brighton are nine points ahead of us and I think it's a tall order to expect us to claw that back with the time we've got left.

"Realistically, we're not going to get automatic promotion,"

"What happened against QPR makes Saturday's game very important. If we don't win that one then we'll be walking on a tightrope.

"But we're still in contact with the play-offs and if we beat Black-pool then we should be in the frame. However, we've got to show more quality in that game than we did against QPR.

"The Blackpool game is going to be very tense but there's nothing I can do about that. If this was a small club with 4,000 fans then it wouldn't be so tense.

"But it's a big club and we could have 13,000 or 14,000 here on Saturday. I'd rather be involved with the big club than the small one."

"The QPR game is a minor blip for us. We can afford one more minor blip and a disaster - as long as neither comes on Saturday," warned Lawrence.

"If we do make the play-offs than the spirit and commitment we showed on Tuesday will stand us in good stead, but the lack of quality and composure won't."

Lawrence could have Des Hamilton back for Saturday's game after he played for the reserves yesterday. Jason Bowen is also a possibility. City will welcome back Graham Kavanagh after his two match suspension. City's skipper and leading scorer is expected to walk straight back into the team and possibly link up with Layton Maxwell after his two good performances. If that happen Paul Brayson will return to the bench.