Ahead of the season-closing trip to the City Ground to play Nottingham Forest, Cardiff City manager Russell Slade insisted he and his players are looking to round off the campaign with a three points that would see them finish 2014/15 in the top half of the Sky Bet Championship table.
“We need to want it more than the opposition this weekend,” he said. “That’s what it boils down to this weekend; who wants to finish in the top half of the table. We’ve both taken fifty-nine points from the forty-five games so far. I know Nottingham Forest very well because that’s where I was brought up. I have family with season tickets there, and they’ll be at the game tomorrow.”
Defender Ben Turner was among the substitutes for last week’s 3-2 Cardiff City Stadium win against Blackpool, and his boss said that City’s number six is likely to get some game time in the East Midlands to complete his return from an extended injury lay-off.
“We want to get Ben Turner game time this weekend,” Russell said. “He’s worked very hard in training and with the Under-21s, so I think that to get him back before the campaign is finished would be very wise.
“I think we do need the summer break to look at targets and improve the squad, but at the same time we’re itching to get back and get into the new season. It’s a massive summer ahead of us, but we knew that months ago. It would have been naïve to think that everything would have been sorted in the January window. We needed to stabilise the Club then, but now we’re in a better position to go forward.”