Cardiff City’s victory over Norwich City on the opening day of the season exceeded all expectations. No one envisaged this new-look team would better one of the pre-season favourites for the title, and manage the feat with so much swagger. It was a great occasion, but probably gave a false impression of where Cardiff currently are in the grand scheme of things.
This is the time of the season when you should get carried away after all, but recent performances were probably more along the lines of what people were initially expecting. That Norwich performance set the bar high, though. That is what we now know they are capable of and what they need to try and emulate on a regular basis.
The mitigating factors at play get repeated ad nauseum, but patience is always in short supply so they bear repeating. There was a massive turnover of players and they will need time to meld. Admittedly, Burnley and Hull also had comparable degrees of upheaval and both are in the top half of the table, but they spent in excess of £20m and £10m respectively, while also reporting a profit. In contrast, Cardiff spent somewhere in the region of £2m and generated no money from sales.
