Steve Morison's message before Cardiff City's Carabao Cup match with Portsmouth was a simple but clear one: give me a decision to make on Saturday.
Suffice to say, Morison's decision-making process will be far less clouded heading into the Birmingham City game this weekend following their second-half surrender against lower league opposition on Tuesday evening.
For all of Cardiff's dominance with the ball in the first half, they had almost 80 percent possession, they were toothless in front of goal, largely relying on shots from range, which were invariably blocked or wayward, as they once again lacked the cutting edge to make telling contributions in the final third.
That has been an issue in all three games so far. The Bluebirds have an extremely low expected goals (xG) output for the first three games of the season and it is a prescient problem which needs correcting with some urgency.
At the other end of the pitch, in the second half, individual errors were rife. Curtis Nelson has now been directly responsible for three of the five goals Cardiff have conceded, Joel Bagan lost his individual battle with Colby Bishop for the third goal and Vontae Campbell's rash and dangerous challenge on Joe Rafferty rounded off the Bluebirds' miserable night with a red card, City's second in three games.
Elsewhere, Ollie Tanner's first outing in professional football served as a bit of a wake-up call. There were flashes of encouragement — he looked undeterred by the challenge and showed resilience to get up and run at his opposite man after one attack had broken down — but he appeared to be trying too hard and nothing quite came off for him.
Eli King ticked play over nicely in the first half but grew more sloppy as the game wore on. Joe Ralls' numerous attempts from distance were all a little desperate, while Mark Harris, for all his willing, was once again unable to provide anything meaningful in front of goal.
Gavin Whyte was arguably one of the better performers, but in many ways typified the Bluebirds' performance; he was tidy and tenacious up until 20 yards from the opposition goal and then failed to strike any killer blows.
When Kion Etete came on, he looked rusty to say the least, miscontrolling the ball on more than one occasion and just appearing to be on a different wavelength to his team-mates, although that will hopefully come for him.
Perhaps only Jaden Philogene came out with some credit. The Aston Villa winger was comfortably City's biggest threat and anything positive tended to be borne of his own tricky wing play. But, on the whole, City's meek performance has not really forced any decision upon Morison, which was the whole point of the evening, really.
“I’m at a loss at the minute," a stunned Morison said immediately after the match. "Such poor goals, just clear the ball, just defend properly. You’ve been given an opportunity to try and get yourself selected for Saturday and no-one chose to do it.
“It’s tough to take a positive out of tonight. No one likes to lose a game of football and we had numerous opportunities and they had a third of what we had and scored three of them. Every one could be preventable.
“I said to them before the game: ‘This is your opportunity to make me have a selection to make.’ And I just said to them now: ‘You’ve made my job really easy because I’ve got a free selection.’
“No one can sit there and say ‘I should be playing’. That goes for the players who played on Saturday as well, so I get a free hit selection-wise. That’s the most disappointing aspect.
"I did all the talking [in the changing room] tonight, no one else needed to say anything. I don't think they can say anything. It's too late for them to take responsibility now.
“It’s just frustrating on the whole. Arguably the turning point was making the substitutes in the 50th minute – everything was pre-planned. We wanted to get Rubin [Colwill] on and it was a lot of people’s first outing. We thought it was more beneficial for him to play in this game than the under-23s, so on a positive note he got 40 minutes.
“But it was a really frustrating one because, from the 50th minute onwards, we were really poor. You have to learn from it. Young or old, you’ve got to learn and you’ve got to learn quickly.
“You can’t make decisions for them when they’re out there. When they’re out there, I can’t make them clear the ball properly, they should know how to clear the ball properly. If you’re marking your man at a corner, you mark your man at a corner. It’s pretty simple stuff. So we need to show up on Saturday. I just don’t have any headaches now.”
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