Anatomy of Cardiff ’s Warnock Way and how it secured promotion
It all starts with a misplaced pass. Leeds United’s Gaetano Berardi doesn’t find a teammate as he looks to spark an attack for the home side. Instead, he finds Cardiff City centre-back Sol Bamba. By the time Leeds get the ball back, they are a goal down.
The date is 3 February, and the Bluebirds are away at Elland Road. They’re 4th in the league, six points astray of second-placed Derby, paying the price for four straight defeats over Christmas.
The game’s only eight minutes old when Bamba takes the ball out of defence with one thing on his mind. A counter-attack.
He feeds Junior Hoilett with a nofrills pass and the winger does well to turn his man before running directly at the retreating Leeds defence. The Cardiff City juggernaut is starting to move up the gears as the Canadian winger cuts infield, looking to create something in this brief window of opportunity as teammates flood forward and Leeds are vulnerable.
A one-two with Yanic Wildschut gets him to the by-line and he earns Cardiff a corner mere seconds after they were bracing themselves for a Leeds attack.
The delivery from Joe Ralls is decent, but Leeds should be able to clear their lines once the initial header is blocked. However, Cardiff have other ideas.
Armand Traore and Bamba press high to win the ball back inside the Leeds box. Bamba then feeds Traore, who picks out a looping cross to the backpost.
It’s unsighted, but the left-back surely has a good idea who will be on the receiving end. Callum Paterson.
Again, Leeds should have it covered but the Scot rises above his man to head home and give Cardiff the lead at Elland Road. They would score four that day.
From defence to attack in a flash, with equal parts skill, power and determination. The archetypal Cardiff goal. Granted, there have been more important goals, undoubtedly, in Cardiff’s unlikely Premier League promotion.
But few come as close to combining all the key facets that makes this team so special.
The key facets that make up The Warnock Way.
Let’s start at the back. Cardiff appear fairly orthodox on paper, almost always lining up as a back four.
But when other teams are in possession, that four switches to a more dynamic three. Think of it as Warnock’s tribute to the Dutch’s ‘Total Football’ – where players were free to move around the pitch in a fluid system. Limit that fluidity to just one or two key defenders and you have Warnock’s disciplined ‘Total Defence’.
How that works is either centreback Sol Bamba or left-back Joe Bennett steps out into midfield, with the other joining captain Sean Morrison and either Lee Peltier or Bruno Ecuele Manga in the back-three.
Occasionally both full-backs move into midfield – with Manga, Bamba and Morrison making up the backthree. It’s all about giving certain individuals – usually the full-backs or a sole centre-back – freedom to roam.
What Pep Guardiola tried to bring to Manchester City’s attacking game last season, where full-backs would move into midfield with the ball, Warnock has done to Cardiff’s defence.
The idea is to close down threats and win the ball back as quickly as possible, regardless of what interesting shapes that stretches their defence into. Warnock’s assistant Kevin Blackwell admits the system is unorthodox, but swears by the efficiency of it.
“What people have failed to notice is that tactically we nullified our opposition,” he said. “Time and time again.
“We used our full backs coming in narrow and you won’t see that in the training manual.
“But if that’s the answer in professional football, that’s what you’ve got to do. Nine times out of 10 myself and Ronnie were able to come up with the answers.”
Against Leeds, Armand Traore, playing left-back instead of the suspended Bennett, goes man-to-man against Ezgjan Alioski – stepping into midfield to press the midfielder.
Manga begins to shift inside to a central position, with Marko Grujic slotting in to cover as an auxiliary right back.
Yanic Wildschut is facing up to Pablo Hernandez — who is currently on the ball. HERNANDEZ’S ball is blocked initially, with the rebound coming to Alioski. Traore is still tight to the winger, but the Leeds player is able to get his pass away.
Wildschut switches off and fails to track the run of Hernandez but Cardiff still have a back-three sitting deep to cover.
PICTURE 2
THE winger gets the ball in and Leeds are unfortunate not to score, with the initial header hitting the bar.
Cardiff’s midfield fail to track the runs – with Ralls, Grujic and Wildschut all switching off. That allows Leeds to get a second shot off.
PICTURE 3
THE system requires complete dedication — with all of the team having to buy into it, otherwise you have chaos. The responsibility is all on the midfielders to track their runners dutifully.
It does allow some freedom for one or two key players, but the rest have to track their man and stay tight.
At Elland Road the midfield switched off for a second — failing to track runs — and that allowed Leeds’ midfield to flood the box and create scoring opportunities.
As Blackwell explains: “You can’t come in with a philosophy that doesn’t suit the players. Philosophies have to be tailored around the players you have, otherwise you’re knackered.
“We had the best defensive record so teams obviously didn’t work us out.” So how do Warnock, Blackwell and Jepsen ensure this system is working at its full potential?
Simple. Lots of fitness work and training at nothing less than full throttle every time.
“We train at 100 per cent, I don’t know any other way. Because what we don’t won’t is players get to a game and they’re not up to match speed”
When the Cardiff defence has faltered, it has been against teams that have managed to isolate the defence from the midfield – which then creates chaos in the fluid back-four who are pulled apart.
The teams that have managed that have typically played quick, short passes with lots of movement – as Leeds did above. Fulham also did it at Cardiff City Stadium on Boxing Day, Wolves in the Welsh capital too.
Even when the fluid Cardiff defence has managed to win the ball back, there have still been some problems.
When Preston blew their unbeaten start to the season to smithereens in a 3-0 win at Deepdale, the ‘total defence’ looked a mess at times.
Again, it is the left-back, this time Bennett, who pushes up to close down the space and rush Preston’s attackers.
PICTURE 4
BENNETT is actually turned but it means little, with Cardiff’s back-three ready to deal with just one forward runner from the hosts.
With Bennett pushing up, Bamba moves across to cover the space vacated by the full-back, ultimately intercepting the pass.
PICTURE 5
WITH Bamba now on the ball, Cardiff’s ‘3-1’ formation in defence is as clear as ever. But Bamba is put under pressure and this time ponders on the ball, gifting Preston possession back.
PICTURE 6
BAMBA easily cuts this out, but takes his time on the ball and is dispossessed.
With Bennett out of position to press, there is no one on the left to cover Bamba’s error on the left side of defence and Preston can build a stronger attack in the second ‘phase’.
PICTURE 7
AS you can see, it isn’t a defence built to hold onto the ball once they’ve won it back — that was the problem against Preston with Bamba being caught in possession.
As such, their defenders rarely hold on to the ball any longer than they need to. Just look at the passing statistics by Cardiff’s defenders between this season and last.
Apart from Bamba, all of Cardiff’s defenders are passing less per game than they did last season.
In particular, Morrison and Peltier’s total passing numbers have dropped dramatically. The reason being that these particular players are the two who sit back in defence — allowing Bamba or Bennett to press further upfield.
Bamba steps up more than most and is probably the most comfortable on the ball, which is why his passing numbers have actually gone up. The philosophy is simple.
Win it as quickly as you can. Move it on even quicker. Once Cardiff have won the ball back, the aim for Warnock is to move it downfield as quickly as possibly. That sounds awfully like long ball, and to an extent it is.
But it’s slightly more sophisticated than just hit and hope. It’s about creating small windows of opportunity for their key players by hard work and graft.
Warnock knows he has three game-changers in the final third. Junior Hoilett, Nathaniel MendezLaing and Kenneth Zohore.
The idea is to give the trio as much time against a disorganised, retreating defence as possible. So rather than aimless balls upfield, it’s getting the ball into the feet of those danger men and letting them cause havoc in the channels. When it comes to passing stats, Cardiff sit bottom of the Championship table in many columns.
Passes attempted, passes completed, possession. They sit at the wrong end of the table when it comes to those statistics.
Again, in isolation, it looks like long ball. No team gets the ball further forward in a shorter amount of time than the Bluebirds.
But it’s all about identifying opportunities and striking when they arise.
COMPILED BY Ben James & Dominic Booth