reset

As much as the mood has undoubtedly improved this season, the root causes of Cardiff’s recent troubles have not simply disappeared.

Tan remains a divisive figure, as do chairman Mehmet Dalman and chief executive Ken Choo.

They were the target of numerous protests last season, some of which saw hordes of supporters marching to Cardiff City Stadium, holding banners and singing songs demanding that Tan and his fellow board members leave.

Some of the ill feeling can be traced back to Tan’s highly controversial rebranding of the club’s colours from red to blue in 2012, even though he reversed the decision three years later.

More recently, the anger relates to his perceived lack of interest, with Tan having not attended a home game for more than two years.

Then, perhaps most damningly, there is the way he, Dalman and Choo have run the club.

Fans, former players and pundits have all highlighted the startling lack of football knowledge at board level, with no layer of expertise between Tan and the many managers he has hired and fired.

Cardiff at least tried a new method in their appointment of Barry-Murphy, forming a one-off sub-committee which included the club’s academy manager Gavin Chesterfield, former Swansea City sporting director Mark Allen and members of the Wasserman agency. However, the final decision still belonged to Tan.

“They didn’t plan to get relegated,” says Perry. “And in hiring Barry-Murphy, is it really a thorough process that we’ve got to the outcome of getting him? I don’t think so.

“It’s a filtering system, a few people narrowing it down to five choices, and those five choices go then to the owner.

“The problem will always be the owner, simply because he hasn’t got that knowledge to pick out of those five. Nathan Jones was in there [on the shortlist], there were others who weren’t similar to Barry-Murphy.

“I’ll only start calling it a process if Barry-Murphy goes and the next appointment is very similar. Then it becomes a process, get another coach who puts a team out that we can identify with as supporters and is also successful.

“But you must have knowledge of what you’re looking for. The same problems are here at this club, and they need to change for us to have success continuously.”

Given how well the Barry-Murphy appointment has gone so far, then, might Tan be convinced to use a director of football or similar on a permanent basis?

“The total opposite,” Perry says. “I think he’ll get carried away, so much so that it will reinforce his own opinion of himself, that he is the right man because of what we’re seeing now.

“He will not look at the process and put his hands up and go, ‘possibly we’re fortunate here because it wasn’t our first choice’.

“You have to be honest, reflection is a key part of football or any big business, but when you reflect you have to be honest and you have to look at your skillset. Then you have to either improve that skillset or you bring somebody in that has those skills. Unfortunately, at City we don’t have that and that is my concern.”

There is no guarantee of an instant return to the Championship. It took Cardiff 18 years to get back to that level when they were last relegated to the third tier in 1985.

Of the 30 teams to have been in the Premier League and relegated to League One, six have never made it back to the Championship.

Given how Cardiff are going this season, they should not add to that number.

Promotion will not fix everything, though.

“I came into this season determined to enjoy it,” says Perry.

“We’re doing well, playing a brand that we identify with and everybody’s happy.

“But you’ve only got to look around the football club and I still see the same mistakes.”

Jan. 29 (UPI) — British Prime Minister Keir Starmer emerged from a meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping in Beijing on Thursday to pronounce that ties between the two countries were back on track, with progress made on trade, tourism and business travel and disrupting illegal migration.

Speaking to reporters after his 80-minute meeting with Xi in the Great Hall of the People, the first by any British leader in eight years, Starmer said it was “very good, productive session with concrete outcomes” that represented a substantive advance.

“It was a real strengthening of the relationship and that’s in the national interest because, of course, there are huge opportunities here in China. A lot of the discussion was about how we open up access for those opportunities, focusing, as I always do, on how this is going to be delivered back in the United Kingdom, how does it benefit people back at home,” he said.

Starmer said headway had been made on Scottish whisky tariffs, visa-free travel to China for Britons and a border security deal on deporting illegal immigrants from Britain, tackling Chinese gangs producing synthetic opioids, and cutting off the flow of Chinese-made marine engines used by people smugglers moving migrants across the English Channel in small boats.

Starmer’s meeting with Xi ran for more than double the period of time scheduled for the talks.

Downing Street later confirmed British citizens would be permitted visits for tourism or business purposes of up to 30 days without a visa.

On issues where they did not see eye to eye, the two sides agreed to “maintain frank and open dialogue,” according to the readout from No. 10.

Starmer insisted he raised human rights at the meeting, including the treatment of the Uyghur minority in China and media mogul and democracy activist Jimmy Lai, a British citizen who has been in prison in Hong Kong since 2020 on sedition and other charges.

He said they had a “respectful discussion” and that his Chinese hosts had listened, with Starmer pointing out that the opportunity to raise “issues we disagree on” was part of the rationale for engagement.

Praising the contributions of past Labour governments to building Sino-British ties, Xi said that China stood ready to move beyond the “twist and turns” to develop a “long-term relationship” with Britain and “consistent, comprehensive, strategic partnership” that would benefit both peoples and the wider world.

However, no major deal or breakthrough came out of the meeting with the only agreement thus far a $20.7 billion investment in China through 2030 by U.K. pharma-giant AstraZeneca to expand its Chinese operation, particularly its work on anti-cancer cell therapy.

The Conservatives’ shadow national security minister, Alicia Kearns, who had urged Starmer to make the release of Lai and the lifting of sanctions on British MPs a condition of his visit, doubled down on her criticism.

“Keir Starmer’s visit tells the Chinese Communist Party they can carry on just as they are,” she wrote on X.