From June, 2007
46 year old Mark Lawn has invested a chunk of his wealth in a half share of Bradford City and joins Julian Rhodes as joint chairman of the resurgent Bradford City.
Lawn made his money with Driver Hire - a driver recruitment agency in Bingley - and spent it wiping out his club’s debts. Julian Rhodes - as with the gusto of Lieutenant Colonel Travis - took a deserved delight in this day saying
We’ve got rid of all the debts apart from a small overdraft facility.
Laws investment is financial stability rather than team building funds but will allow City to concentrate revenue on the football side of the business rather than servicing the debts. Lawn will also take over as the public face of the club. The new Geoffrey Richmond in the nicest possible way.
Richmond’s dawn at City was brilliant but in the scheme of things all to brief. The new man at Bradford City could dip into the Geoffrey manual for tub-thumping but will do well to bang a less hollow drum than Richmond’s pushing energy and resource into building of more permanent structures at the club. The youth program begins to brings fruit and always needs augmenting, the scheme that is selling City season tickets for less than twenty quid more than Bradford Park Avenue ones is peerless in football in terms of an investment in the future of our club and the financial boost can be to this generation what kid-for-a-quid was to others.
Lawn begins with a club as low as it has been for many a decade and tired of the much heard mantra that the only way was up - down seems to have been the more commonly taken route - but his arrival coincides (not by accident) with Stuart McCall’s third coming and an increased sense of the positive around the club.
All of which is very much a new day and one which needs to be ceased with both hands because to return to the metaphor - this new dawn breaks over the last chance saloon.
At the moment we are waiting for Stuart McCall and Wayne Jacobs to be shown off as the new boss and assistant at City but they are at Valley Parade doing the jobs.
The jobs they have are pretty big. City went down last year after a pretty good start and if you look at the tables before and after Christmas City are not just edging out of League One are are kicked out with force. We haven’t done the business much in the last six months and we haven’t done the business at home for years.
Although for a time last term Colin Todd had City making hay at Valley Parade. Crewe got murdered 4-0 with JJ and Lee Holmes ripping in down the flanks. It seems that the best City teams have the two wingers in them. JJ and Holmes were like Peter Beagrie and Jamie Lawrence with one going at you and one getting the crosses in. I’ve heard people say that Holmes going back to Derby injured was the start of the reasons City got relegated and it does seem like it is the end of Dean Windass’s goal scoring at VP.
Omar Daley could be McCall’s new JJ just as he promised to be Todd’s but bet your bottom dollar that the new City boss is looking for a left winger to put in that play-making performance Beagers used to give. If he manages like he plays then McCall will want some tacklers in the midfield like Craig Bentham and he will want a ginge with fire in his belly like Joe Colbeck and he will want a good passer who can find a man like Gareth Whalley could that who he can have his McCall style player shove the ball leaving the play-making to the left wing.
But then again what is the point of having a good crosser of a ball when you do not have a striker to nod it home? The more you look at McCall’s team the more you think that he has got himself a jigsaw with about five bits missing. Sure the goalkeeper and the central defenders are in place but loads of other things are just waiting to be done.
The really important thing is that someone with some cash comes in and gets us some more pieces.
Stuart McCall will be shown off as the new Bradford City manager on Monday morning and as he returns to Valley Parade for his third coming and after many years of silent mumbles from the club expect there to be there will be much talk about the two men flanking him.
One will be Wayne Jacobs - or we at BfB hear it will be - was McCall picks the steady hand of the former Bantams left back his number two. Jacobs is a serious man, a devout Christian whose commitment to the Bantams sits him alongside any to have worn the claret and amber. If the public face of Stuart McCall for some is the Scot falling off the top of a car then Jacobs is the signal of serious intent needed to put that ghost to rest. McCall is here to do business in his first job managing a football team and wants all to see it and that is why Jacobs and not the equally qualified but publicly less sombre such as Peter Beagrie stands alongside him.
Flanking McCall on the other side is a man who’s name we omit if only for clarity of spelling (Is it the stuff in the garden or the pork product?) A local businessman with seven figures to invest in his home town club he is going to join Julian Rhodes at the helm of Bradford City’s new dawn. He has been very significant in bringing Stuart McCall back to Bradford City and has put his money as well as his faith in the new manager. He does not have ginger - or strawberry blonde - hair as the men who are charged with taking the club forward do but his arrival is no less significant.
And in the background is Julian Rhodes. Never one to cling to the spotlight and uneasy in front of the media Rhodes has had Bradford City forced upon him after getting involved in a good idea nearly ten years ago only to end up keeping the club he follows together with re-mortages and hope.
Without him and the Herculean endeavours he has faced to maintain a business where there was no business hope this day would not have come.