Cardiff City wanted one or two more players this summer. Instead, the window closed with Brian Barry-Murphy refusing to compromise on his targets.
For weeks, there had been a sense that the Bluebirds were building towards something. Barry-Murphy had taken a young, exciting group of players, given them another year of development together and watched them emerge from League One as a promotion-winning side with momentum firmly behind them.
There was an obvious argument to be made – add a striker and a winger to the mix and Cardiff could have a squad capable of competing at the right end of the Championship.
Then the deadline passed.
No striker. No winger. No late-night deal to send supporters into a frenzy.
And, let’s be frank, it is perfectly understandable why plenty of Cardiff supporters are left reeling.
This was a window in which the club appeared to have a chance to capitalise on the momentum generated by last season. The team is young, entertaining and increasingly cohesive. The football has been exciting. The performances against the likes of Sheffield United have suggested this is not a group content simply to survive. These lot can really thrive.
Yet when the opportunity came to strengthen the areas everyone could see needed strengthening, Cardiff ultimately chose not to do so. We will get on to the reasons for why.
That is where the frustration comes from. Social media was not a fun place to be on Tuesday night.
The supporters are not imagining the shortcomings. Even those inside the club acknowledge that, ideally, they would have brought in another one or two players. The squad is too thin in certain areas and, while the club remained open to additions, they were not prepared to compromise their recruitment principles simply to add numbers.
And there is another important point here.
While transfer windows can often see anger directed towards the very top, multiple sources have indicated that Barry-Murphy ultimately had the decisive say over the players who came in. Or, more pertinently, those who didn’t.
It is his squad. He trains these players every day. He picks the team. He has to believe in the footballers he brings into the dressing room.
If a player is signed simply because there is a perceived hole in the squad, rather than because the manager genuinely believes he can improve it, then the consequences can be worse than simply having one fewer player.
Barry-Murphy has extraordinarily high standards. He would rather trust players he knows, likes and believes in than compromise those standards to tick a box.
That is the case for the defence and that philosophy has shaped this entire window.
So how did Cardiff get here? There was plenty of logic to the original plan.
Calum Scanlon, Nathan Trott and Omari Kellyman had all spent last season at Cardiff on loan with a view to bringing them back. Scanlon and Trott have returned and both have started the new campaign encouragingly.
Kellyman was different.
His sale to Strasbourg, Chelsea’s sister club, represented a significant blow to Cardiff’s plans because they had expected to have that attacking option available again. He had communicated his desire to return and Cardiff were delighted and felt they had a multi-positional asset back on board.
The club was then forced to pivot. A winger was identified, but that deal did not materialise after the player chose a different opportunity.
The pursuit of Jens Hjertø-Dahl was real, too, despite some questioning it, and Cardiff made a £6.2m bid. Hull City ultimately came in and blew the Bluebirds out of the water.
Those were two significant blows to a recruitment strategy that is deliberately specific. And that, ultimately, is the downside of being specific.
If you are looking for a particular type of player, with a particular profile and the right character to fit a particular dressing room, you are inevitably going to miss out sometimes.
Cardiff did.
The striker situation is perhaps the biggest source of frustration.
The club had been looking for a forward throughout the summer, yet not one viable striker ever seemed to emerge publicly as a serious Cardiff target.
With so little coming out, so few targets courted publicly, and so little said on record to sate fans’ appetites while rivals prosper in the transfer market, it can be difficult for supporters to stomach. It can feel like the wind being knocked out of the sails.
It can often feel like the club aren’t doing anything, when, of course, that is not the case. But it’s all a totting-up effect for fans over the course of a summer, much of it without football as a distraction.
As recently as the weekend, a striker and a winger, both Premier League loans, were lined up. Neither materialised for one reason or another.
Then, in the final throes of the window, attention briefly turned towards the possibility of a full-back after Genoa were thought to be interested in Ronan Kpakio, WalesOnline has learned.
But Genoa opted for former Cardiff loanee Cody Drameh instead, and the Bluebirds ultimately decided they did not need another right-back.
Instead, they put their faith in Kpakio as Perry Ng’s understudy.
That is the kind of decision which can look either inspired or reckless depending on what happens over the next four months.
And that, ultimately, is the problem with assessing this window. There is no definitive answer yet.
One of the biggest debates around Cardiff for years has been recruitment.
Supporters have consistently called for a stronger structure around the manager, with Erol Bulut perhaps the most vocal advocate for expanding the operation during his time in charge. The appointment of a director of football and a figure who could be held accountable for recruitment was seen as one potential solution.
But that structure has never really been established at Cardiff. There seems to be very few people tasked with huge remits at Cardiff and, in in the view of many supporters, they need more help around them.
There remains a unique set-up at board and senior management level, and attempts to build something resembling a traditional football operation have rarely been sustained.
This summer, Barry-Murphy and head of recruitment Paddy Deboys have worked extremely closely together.
The pair were central to Cardiff’s recruitment, with Krystian Bielik himself highlighting the conversations he had with both men when explaining why he chose to join.
Bielik and Jack Moylan are perhaps the clearest examples of the strategy working exactly as intended.
Both had been tracked for more than a year, it is understood. Cardiff had tried to sign both last summer, shortly after Barry-Murphy arrived, but the deals were not possible.
They stayed close to the situations. When the opportunity presented itself again, they were ready.
That is very different from frantically scrambling around on deadline day looking for anyone who can fill a position. It has some semblance of a plan, which is encouraging.
When Cardiff were relegated, the squad had become bloated. Players could see there was little route into the team, standards dropped and the pathway for academy players became harder to navigate.
The current thinking is almost the exact opposite.
Keep the group tight. Give everybody a genuine opportunity to play. Use multi-positional players to provide flexibility. Maintain competition for places. Keep the academy pathway open. That’s the strategy.
There is merit to that argument.
You cannot spend an entire year preaching about developing young players and creating a pathway into the first team, only to block that pathway because you are afraid to have a hole in the squad.
And the club also points to another important factor – keeping the core of this promotion-winning group together.
There were bids and significant interest in some of Cardiff’s players this summer. The owner was clear that retaining the nucleus of the squad was just as important as adding to it.
Selling one of the key players and then spending the rest of the window trying to replace him would have been counterproductive.
So the club’s position is relatively straightforward.
They believe the players they have brought in have improved the team. They believe the group they have retained has enormous potential. And they believe adding somebody who does not meet their standards could ultimately do more harm than good.
There is also a financial reality.
Moylan cost around £3m, Bielik around £2.5m and Trott around £1.5m. That is roughly £7m of spending, which is not going to transform a Championship squad in the current market.
Before Bielik arrived, Barry-Murphy was explicit about the club having spent relatively little and being confident it could still bring players in.
And, importantly, he was never pretending he did not want additions.
“I think it’s obvious we’re looking to add to the squad,” he said on August 17.
After Bielik arrived, he was asked how keen he remained to strengthen.
“Very keen,” was the answer.
On August 25, he hoped Cardiff would be “very” busy during the final days.
As recently as Saturday, he said he felt “confident” more players could be brought in.
They weren’t. That is why it is too simplistic to say Barry-Murphy was simply happy with his squad all along. He wanted more. He just wasn’t prepared to take somebody he did not believe in.
And that is where Cardiff have made a calculated gamble. And it is a gamble, because this group of players isn’t a million miles away from the one which finished bottom of the Championship.
The club’s own internal view is that this is a two-window season. January will provide another opportunity to assess exactly where the squad is, what it needs and what becomes available, with the budget potentially more flexible depending on the league position.
That may prove to be a sensible approach. Or it may come back to bite them.
If Yousef Salech gets injured, Cardiff suddenly have a very obvious problem. He offers something unique within this squad and there is no longer an Omari Kellyman waiting in the wings to provide a solution.
If Ollie Tanner suffers an injury, there is no natural like-for-like replacement on the right flank either, although Isaak Davies or perhaps Kpakio could provide alternative solutions.
Those are legitimate concerns.
So too is the broader question of whether Cardiff have left themselves one or two players short of genuinely competing for the play-offs.
That accusation is fair. They had all summer to get six players – why was there a mad rush? Other clubs were building squads all summer. All valid frustrations from supporters.
But it is also impossible to know whether those one or two additions would actually have made the difference between finishing 14th and fourth. They were understood to be young Premier League loans, whether they would have had the impact of Kellyman or not is not known.
Football rarely works that neatly.
The last time this team took to the pitch, against Sheffield United, the overriding feeling was one of excitement. Supporters were watching a young Cardiff side go toe-to-toe with one of the Championship’s biggest clubs and trying to win the game on its own terms.
That is what fans want.
They would rather watch this team, flaws and all, than watch a plodding side edge towards 1-0 victories and eventually finish somewhere in mid-table.
This group will lose games. It will be naïve at times. It will concede soft goals. It will probably frustrate the life out of its supporters on occasions.
But when it gets things right, it is a joy to watch. That’s rarely been the case in recent years, if we are all honest.
The biggest concern I have, though, is whether too much of this is currently being held together by Barry-Murphy himself.
Cardiff’s ambition, secretly, upon his arrival, was to build a structure which would allow managers of his ilk to come into the club and operate within it seamlessly.
Perhaps that work is happening quietly behind the scenes. Perhaps the intention is to scale it up once Championship revenues begin to flow again, and further still if Cardiff eventually make it back to the Premier League.
But from the outside, it is difficult to see a fully developed structure capable of surviving the departure of the manager.
That’s why tying Barry-Murphy down to a new three-year contract was probably the best piece of business Cardiff did this summer. It protects the club and gives this project stability.
But it will not stop a Premier League club taking him if the right opportunity and the right compensation package arrive.
The hope has to be that enough has changed at Cardiff over the past year for the foundations to remain when, eventually, the man at the centre of it all moves on. Or perhaps the club progresses upwards with him and this is a long-term project for everyone.
For now, though, the window is over. It wasn’t vintage and the criticism will come into sharp focus after a defeat or when an injury occurs, such is the nature of the beast.
The anger is understandable. The club have left themselves exposed in certain areas and even those inside the building concede they would have liked another one or two players – having had all summer to address the issues.
But – saliently – there is a belief in this group and the culture they have created. They believe that bringing somebody in for the sake of it could damage the very thing they are trying to build.
There was no panic in the end. Previous managers had spent hours on the phone to Vincent Tan on deadline day. It is understood Barry-Murphy didn’t call the owner once on Tuesday.
Whether that proves to be wisdom or folly will be judged over the next few months, of course. But the transfer window cannot be changed now. The striker is not coming through the door. The winger is not arriving.
This is the group Cardiff have. And it is an exciting one.
Five or 10 years from now, supporters may look back at this generation and remember it for what it achieved last season, maybe what it went on to achieve this season and the football it produced along the way.
That is the challenge now and the siege mentality begins. The excuses end.
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