Jones keen to saddle up

CHAMPIONSHIP PLAY-OFF FINAL: Cardiff City v Blackpool: REGULAR VISITORS to the Vale of Glamorgan hotel should brace themselves for a bizarre sight if Cardiff City beat Blackpool at Wembley today to return to the top flight for the first time since 1962. Dave Jones may be a familiar face among those who use the complex where the football club train, but there are sure to be a few double-takes if Cardiff's manager keeps his promise to ride through the main gate on horseback next season.

There is a lighter side to Jones but the Liverpudlian was deadly serious when he vowed to mark promotion to the Premier League by turning up for training on one of the horses he owns. “The day it happens I will be saddling up,” he said. “I’ve asked Gerald Leeke, owner at the Vale of Glamorgan hotel, to put me up a little post where I can leave him. It will be fantastic. I know the television cameras will be down here. But then I can be a proper cowboy.”

Before then, however, there is one more hurdle to overcome and the stakes are huge. “Life-changing” is how Jones describes the prospect of winning promotion to the Premier League, and those words could not be more appropriate in the case of Cardiff, whose financial future has yet to be secured despite the prospect of a Malaysian businessman taking over next week and investing much-needed cash as well as settling a €2.2 million tax bill.

Off-the-field turmoil is something Jones has become used to after five years in charge at Cardiff. The former Stockport, Southampton and Wolves manager remembers arriving at a club where the motto was “if it wasn’t nailed down it was sold”.

Cardiff were playing in a ramshackle stadium at the time and training took place in surroundings that seem a million miles away from their current base. “Dog-shit park. That’s what we used to call it,” Jones said.

Yet it was not only the facilities that created a gloomy impression. Jones has a lot of affection for the Welsh people, whom he describes as “very proud”, but he has come to realise the word optimism is not part of their vocabulary. “I thought people carried the doom cloud over their heads at Wolves. They carry a bucket and a doom cloud here,” the 53-year-old said, smiling. “They always think the worst.”

That might be easier said than done this afternoon, when the eyes of a country are going to be on Cardiff as they try to become the first club from outside England to play in the Premier League. “We are trying to take a nation into the Premier League,” Jones said. “But it’s fantastic for this football club. This will be the third time we have been to Wembley (following two appearances during their FA Cup run in 2008) and that doesn’t roll off the tongue when you talk about Cardiff City.”

Jones will certainly know what to expect from Blackpool and in particular from their larger-than-life manager, Ian Holloway. He has known Holloway for some time and after a match at Plymouth a couple of years ago they realised they shared an interest in horses, which surely led to one of the more unusual transfer agreements ever to take place between two football managers. “Olly’s daughters were moving on to better equestrian-standard horses and he had an Arab horse, Alim, that he asked me if I would be interested,” Jones said.

“All my daughters used to ride but we used to stable them out. When I moved here, we had some land and stables, and decided to look after our own. It’s great. I had to go down to Plymouth with my horsebox and when I got down there Olly was asking me all these questions. I realised he was vetting me to make sure I was suitable and that we had good facilities. I’ve got a lot of time for him, though. He’s a good friend of mine. But I still want to beat him today.”

GuardianService