Above their weight... do have strength in depth?
20 minutes in after Lee Peltier was forced off injured.
The decision now for Slade is whether to pitch the Brazilian back into his side for the visit of Sheffield Wednesday on Saturday or to stick, for the moment at least,with Scott Malone at left-back.
Ameobi, of course, is a regular bench-warmer for the Bluebirds.
The wideman, on season-long loan from Newcastle, has found it difficult to cement a regular place in the Cardiff starting side.
Often called upon to be an impact player, there are very few Championship side’s right now though who would not welcome him with open arms.
Indeed the same could be said of the rest of that bench in Lancashire, too
Manga is rated one of the best centre-halves in the Championship, Premier League class by many, and he is fit again now after his own injury woes.
He has been kept out by the great form of Sean Morrison and Matthew Connolly, although, as the Bluebirds have started to look a lot more frail at the back in recent games, you wonder if Manga’s route back to the first team might not be starting to open up a bit more.
Mason, once on loan at Burnley, could easily see himself leading the line elsewhere; after all, he was doing just that at Cardiff until the recent arrival of Tony Watt on loan from Charlton and Dikgacoi is also a recent exile from the starting XI.
The midfield enforcer has been out through injury himself and found a revamped Cardiff midfield and a sudden surge in form by Aron Gunnarsson putting his recall status on hold for the moment.
The big call at Bolton by Slade though was to drop Whittingham to the bench and bring in Anthony Pilkington to add, the manager said, some forward momentum to his side. And it seemed to work, with Pilkington grabbing the winning goal against the Trotters.
Whittingham himself remains one of the classiest acts in the secondtier and his presence among the
. Bluebirds’ substitutes is surely the clearest indication of just how many options Slade has right now.
When you factor in the fact that the highly-rated Matthew Kennedy is not even in the match-day squad, along with the likes of Stuart O’Keefe and Gabniel Tamas and also the fact that striker Idriss Saadi should be fit again in January, you do start to wonder just how strong Slade’s case will be when he goes to the club’s hierarchy looking to add even more players in January.
What is certain for now, is that if there were such a thing as a Championship table made up of matches between the substitute benches of all the clubs, Cardiff would be top of the league and most likely by a mile, too.