Looking for Effort from Stuart McCall

At 3-0 down and on the way out of the FA Cup nothing seems good.

Stuart McCall had seen his Bradford City team come second best in almost every department to a Tranmere Rovers side managed by Ronnie Moore – a man who further from McCall in the affections of City fans it is hard to imagine – and doing well in the division above.

That thought is mulled around the mind for a while. The visitors are a good distance apart in the league table than City for a reason and those reasons are easily apparent and not only in moments when the loathsome Chris Greenacre is isolated with David Wetherall and exposes the older man’s lack of pace cruelly.

For it is not just the physical aspects of the game in which Rovers obviously superior – and more handsomely rewarded – squad best City in.

Moore’s team is drilled on hard work, learned in the fussless big man/small man pairing up front and in Ian Goodison have a rock of a defender cleaning out all with efficiency.

Contrast this with fellow Jamaican Omar Daley who madly tries to run the ball away from goal at forty yards only to be – once again – easily robbed. Within seconds and without attention from City’s right winger who believes winning the ball is something that the other players do Tranmere had fired into a lead that while threatened by Wetherall hitting the bar and Peter Thorne having a shot cleaned off the line was never overhauled.

Hard to imagine what Moore would make of a player like Daley who seems wear lack of effort like a badge. Hard to imagine what Paul Jewell would make of him but fairly easy to picture the reaction of Jewell’s skipper at City. Why, one is forced to wonder, does McCall allow just a lack of effort to become endemic in his own team? The apathy of Daley is mirrored in GNN and results in heads sinking down and only a handful of players worthy of a place in a ten next to Stuart let alone picked by him.

Stuart has let the bar go so low for effort in his Bradford City team that anyone with the bit between their teeth or the whips of a forceful manager at their backs will who with ease.

Give me the effort of Joe Colbeck, Barry Conlon, and Craig Bentham et al any day for it is not the battles we lose that are a problem at Bradford City – Tranmere deserved the win on their own merits – it is the inability to suit up for the good fight.

Watching the effort put in by Paul Evans go unrewarded as games are lost to malaise as typified by Daley’s could not care less performance, by GNN’s comments about wanting to sign for the club because his own contract at Gillingham is finishing rather than for our club’s benefit, by the sudden increase in minor injuries and illness at the club.

I think of Stuart McCall the player and doubt he would stand alongside it, I look to Stuart McCall the manager and hope that he does not stand for it.