From June, 2007
Stuart McCall must have spend a longer time behind a desk this month than he has in the rest of his career as he starts putting together the process that will see him put together a squad. When David Wetherall took over as City boss he had to sit out a few games to cope with the change. McCall - a fine coach by his Blades reputation - will be getting used to the soft leather of the Valley Parade big chair.
Perception of the job of football recruitment is different from the reality. McCall goes through targets sent to him from all over Europe on DVDs and through website links which here at BfB we are often mistakenly presented with. No one ever says on their CV that they slack off after seventy minutes and everyone looks sublime.
Wheat is split from chaff. Two 21 year old Barnsley youngsters called Thomas Harban and Nathan Joynes are coming to City on trail with a view to a loan - the Mark Lawn cash is not to be splashed as much as one might have thought. City have made an offer for Scunthorpe’s left back Lee Ridley and go head to head with Cheltenham for the player.
For that there is good reason. An old anecdote about a former team mate of McCall has the player asking for a free transfer in March and his boss agreeing the he could go in the Summer but that they would list him at deadline day only to get a £250,000 offer “and not a penny more even though you could get it”. The footballer’s value is tied into unfathomable and many a manager has frittered away a fortune on players who offered no better than those available for next to nothing.
Next to nothing seeps out of Valley Parade and season ticket sales continue. This is the calm. The storm brews.
Stuart McCall has missed out on the singing of Spencer Weir-Daley who joined Notts County - geographically closer to the former Nottingham Forest man’s home no doubt - as the Bantams starts to try assemble a squad.
Fast striker Weir-Daley showed some usefulness at City at the end of last season but his Issy Rankin-esque finishing suggests that City are not missing out on anything like a natural born footballer. Weir-Daley is typical of the players at this level.
In the Premiership the guy you think is garbage on TV is actually very good if not superb at everything. In The Championship the players are mostly very good but have a single flaw - age, a lack of pace, a bad first touch - that prevents them going to the top level. In League One most players are of the same ability level but some have one or two spikes of talent which single them out. Marc Bridge-Wilkinson was a great example of this type of player in that he could hit a ball and pass superbly but he was no one’s box to box tackling midfielder and ultimately he is revealed as having low limits.
In League Two those spikes are absent and most players are as good as the next man. Talent is less then organisation, spirit and determination. He who runs the team best wins and so Weir-Daley’s shoes will be filled by many, many potential signings.
The list grows longer on a daily basis. Pint sized midfielder John Spicer of Burnley is on McCall’s radar, Imre Deme from Ferencvaros has been offered and Simon Francis continues to be mentioned. McCall is unmoved saying
I’m not going to be rushed into bringing the wrong people in. I could go out today and bring six players in and three months down the line realise they are not the right ones.
McCall’s plans for bringing in players are in flux with one signing being robbed this week when his first team chances at his current club improved following a transfer request. It is frustrating but to give the Bantams an edge over rivals next season McCall knows he needs to shape a squad with the right attitude. Leon Osbourne’s Facebook dalliances this week show how easy it is for negativity to seep into a squad.
For all the legs of Weir-Daley McCall’s team needs players who will show the character needed for the fight ahead. The enduring image of Weir-Daley is his game against Leyton Orient and how after spurning first half chances - created by pace and skill - his head fell.
Continue looking.
Scarborough have always maintained a position close to my heart. Seaside town, nice little ground and when in 1987 they became the first club to claim automatic promotion to the Football League from the Conference they did it with Bradford City Legend Ces Podd at right back. They were a nice little club.
And for a little club they made some progress. After promotion they were bought up by a guy who had recently sold lighter company Ronson and he moved them forward a little before reaching what he perceived to be a ceiling and closing the coffers. He ended up swapping the club for another who he believed would not be held back by the little club tag that Boro always had and moved into Bradford City. That man was Geoffrey Richmond. The rest of that story you know.
The rest of the Scarborough story ended this morning at the High Court in Leeds with debts of £2.5m pushing the ailing team out of business. A statement from the club said it all
While it is sad to see the demise of a club with a proud history of 128 years, the club’s finances have for a number of years been in a very poor state and the company has been in and out of various insolvency proceedings.
Scarborough tried to sell the stadium but could not. The Judge noted that the early winding up would allow the Supporters Trust to form a new club and carry on the tradition of football. 128 years of tradition to be exact.
Scarborough has been in the League until 1999 and were in the UniBond League for next season after two relegations. At the top of that the larger league Watford took away £20m for finishing bottom. Next season £60m will do to the final placed club. The creeping mismanagement of Boro’s finances are one thing - business of football is often characterised by how badly it is done - but what we have here is a club starving to death on the outskirts of the richest City in the country. A drive past Black Fryer’s Bridge says we can do this is life but I hope that football could be an escape from those harsh realities.
There is something fundamentally wrong with the way that football works. Scarborough crash while others boom and the laws put into place to protect the game and it’s institutions are woefully inadequate being used to punish the weak in the case of Rotherham last season and reward the cunning. Leeds United, I refer to thee.
Every attempt to put a rule in place that could have been put in place to help the clubs who suffer in administration has been thwarted by opportunists such as Ken Bates at Leeds or the Leicester City directors that walked away from Filbert Street. Geoffrey Richmond’s plan to readdress the situation in 2001 was good sense from the wrong mouthpiece.
Richmond’s plan was to let football get its house in order post-ITV Digital by offering new contracts and making redundant players who would not sign them. It was a harsh way of ripping up a deal and the worry for some that prized assets would use this contract freedom to leave for The Premiership on free transfer scupperred it. Clubs like Scarborough ended up on a slow route to extinction and for whatever reason could not find a way off it.
A historical anomaly - and a worthwhile footnote - that it was Geoffrey Richmond’s attempts to make football law that could have saved his old club.