Just hours after Ole Gunnar Solskjaer’s Ford Focus left the Cardiff City car park for the final time, interim manager Danny Gabbidon began methodically but ineffectually scrubbing the departing boss’ philosophy from a tactical white board.
As Cardiff’s players looked on, Gabbidon, sweating profusely with the effort, managed to remove several of the principle tenets of compatibilist predestination, but struggled in vain with Solskjaer’s heavily underlined assertion that ‘all ends are inevitable and beyond the control of any man.’
Gabbidon eventually gave up on trying to erase Solskjaer’s fatalistic treatise and settled for drawing a standard 4-5-1 formation over the top of the existing diagram of 11 men looking to the heavens in humble, tremorous reverence.
“The ex-gaffer’s worked hard to teach us the ultimate futility of our actions and we all have a lot of respect for that,” Tom Adeyemi told FourFourTwo.
“He showed us that the league table calculates itself, we players are merely pawns in a greater design. We have free will - we can pass right or we can pass left, but whichever we do Middlesbrough will just score on the break.
“It’s going to take quite a long time to embrace a philosophy that stresses the importance of human endeavour or picking up a man on the edge of the box.”
Gabbidon struggled to convince the players that there was anything to be gained from practising defending set-pieces rather than watching to see where the ball would end up and praying for a merciful death, which was Solskjaer’s strategy.
“The interim gaffer’s introduced a basic zonal marking system for corners and I’m sure we’ll be working on that over the next few weeks,” Adeyemi explained.
“But surely if we head the ball out of the box it’ll just come right back in there. Isn’t it better just to entrust it to the fates and hope the striker heads over?
In response to Adeyemi’s existentialist funk, Gabbidon asserted that his players needed to ‘want it more’ but that comment led to a lengthy series of questions from the players on the illusory nature of human desire.
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