Cork’s Brian Barry-Murphy leading Cardiff City revival as the Blue Birds chase promotion 

The crash felt inevitable, not that it made any difference when the final blow came.

Cardiff City were relegated to League One for the first time since 2003, six years after their last stint in the top flight of the English football pyramid. 

What made matters worse was the growing sense of crisis in the Welsh capital as their representative football club went through a campaign with three managers and just nine victories from 46 games.

"It's been an inevitability staring us in the face. It's death by a thousand cuts – I've felt it's been coming for years," former Cardiff striker Nathan Blake told BBC Sport Wales.

"There's a lot of responsibility that needs to be shared among a lot of people, rather than just focusing on the team or manager. 

"You do have to look at those above and say 'maybe you've run your course'. I think they ran their course a long time ago.” 

The Blue Birds were lost, with a transfer ban to complicate proceedings over an administrative issue with their accounts, and it took Cork native Brian Barry-Murphy to guide them towards salvation.

The coach was installed over the summer and is already leading a promotion charge in Wales, with an exciting squad that is scoring goals for fun and challenging on multiple fronts. 

The EFL Cup galvanised this, as Cardiff reached the quarter finals by knocking out arch rivals Wrexham and their journey ended with a spirited defeat on home soil to Chelsea.

Barry-Murphy, who made his name with Rochdale and Manchester City’s Elite Development Squad, has driven this revival and people have taken note.

Former Wales international Iwan Roberts summed this up during the week in an interview with Feast of Football podcast.

"There's been a lot of unrest at the club, a big divide between supporters and the people who run the club and the person who owns the club," he explained.

"That's sort of in the distant past now. They have made the decision to bring BBM (Barry-Murphy) in and they have got it absolutely spot on.

"He gets the club, he gets the supporters, he has united everything, he has a winning team, a winning formula, and they are doing it in a stylish way."

But what has Barry-Murphy done to promote such a rapid transformation at Cardiff City and soothe the pains of relegation?

The coach looked to home, after a line of inspiration from his former boss at Manchester City, Pep Guardiola.

“Guardiola would always say: ‘Remember where you’ve come from, our teams represent who we are.’ I’m from Cork representing Cardiff now and there’s a Celtic correlation there where you have to display the values of the people watching the games,” Barry-Murphy explained to The Guardian.

This manifested in the city’s desire to see local faces in the squad, and with this came the election and emergence of Ronan Kpakio and Dylan Lawlor into the first team under Barry-Murphy. 

Joel Colwill, who hails from Neath near Swansea, also stepped up into a group known for aggression and adventure on the pitch.

The Blue Birds combined this way of operating into a free flowing side that opened their season with 11 goals in six games, with seven knocked in by the end of August. 

Cardiff only conceded just three times during that sequence, as the club rose to take top spot in the table by week five.

There has been struggles, like the sequence through September that brought just one win from four outings and the back to back defeats incurred between October and November. 

Cardiff City responded each time, to slowly establish themselves at the top of the table alongside Lincoln City.

The club are finally back in a competitive way and operating in a way that is enjoyable for all those involved in the Welsh capital.

The future is theirs to take and that’s the most important thing, as Cardiff continue to dust themselves off after experiencing the most brutal of crashes.