Filed under: Cardiff, Championship, Football
With just five games to remaining, Cardiff City are in the box seat with the destiny now back in their own hands for the promotion run-in.While the Championship's top spot may all be done and dusted, the scramble for the other promotion place behind QPR is for Cardiff to lose.
Barring a remarkable collapse, Rangers have the title - and a return to the top-flight - secured, albeit with the threat of a points deduction hanging over them.
Now the Premier League is ready to welcome its first Welsh club as Dave Jones, the Championship's longest serving manager, bids to finish the job he started back in the summer of 2005.
A run of play-off heartbreaks reached a climax last season with a 3-2 defeat to Blackpool in the final.
It appeared that Wembley loss would be win or bust as a host of players were expected to be sold to reduce their long-standing debt.
They had already survived four winding-up orders but Far East investors from Malaysia, who had vowed to purchase the club whether they were promoted or not, kept to their word.
The takeover saw chairman Peter Ridsdale leave his position and there was no mass clear out as expected with summer bids for the likes of Peter Whittingham and Michael Chopra rejected.
Then came Craig Bellamy's controversial loan move back to his hometown club from Manchester City, with the 2008 FA Cup finalists believed to be paying £30,000-a-week towards his hefy wages.
The gamble appears to have paid off with the expensively-assembled Cardiff side overcoming a mid-season wobble to come strong at the business end of the campaign.
But for Cardiff manager Jones, who led Wolves back to the top-flight before being sacked six months after their immediate relegation, this is a chance he has been waiting for.
He said: "This is totally different club to the one I arrived at.
"It's much more professionally run. That isn't intended as a slight to any of the previous managers because they could only work with the tools they had.
"I actually admire some of them because it's beyond me how they survived in those conditions. I don't think I could have done it - I would have walked away.
"The situation when I arrived was that if it wasn't nailed down, they sold it. We didn't even have a training ground. I'd wait for the phone call every morning to tell me which school or park was available on the day.
"One season we went from October to February without once training on grass. It was ridiculous.
"Now the club is finally geared up for the Premier League."
Cardiff have been the perennial end of season chokers under Jones.
With key matches left against Portsmouth, QPR, Preston, Middlesbrough and Burnley, they have the perfect chance to shed that tag once and for all.
And for Jones it's a chance for Premier League redemption.
The Liverpudlian, 54, enjoyed a productive spell in the hot-seat with Southampton before he was put on gardening leave when he was falsely accused and cleared of child abuse 12 years ago.
He never returned to his old job and lost out on the chance of the trips to the likes of Old Trafford, Anfield and Stamford Bridge before his one-season top-flight stint with Wolves.
Jones added: "I reckon I did all right in the Premier League until it was taken away from me.
"But no one is going to give that back to me so I'll have to get it for myself.
"The best thing I can do is take Cardiff up and turn them into a big club."
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