Heck Of A Good Signing

Paul Heckingbottom is a Bradford City player again, again and I couldn’t be happier.

Heckingbottom is exactly the sort of player I want City to have. For a start he is took good for this division even if he isn’t good enough for The Championship and I’m not sure that he isn’t to be honest. Second he fits right in at City being from near enough to almost be a home grown lad (Even his name conjures up Bantams of old – Ed.) and third he is the sort of honest footballer I love to watch.

I’ve never seen Hecky do anything other than put in 100% for City. I’ve never seen him drop to his knees to dive or point at team mates when he makes a mistake or any of that rubbish that you see all the time in football these days. I’ve never once looked at the left back this season and not thought that we had a guy who will give us everything.

Maybe it is the Wayne Jacobs effect because him and Heckingbottom are peas in a pod when it comes to attitude and credit goes to Stuart and Wayne for signing him up.

At this level footballers get lazy. It is dead easy for a player to decide that the other ten guys are the reason things aren’t going so good in League Two and it is dead easy for players to stroll out the end of contracts blaming everyone else for failing to get to the play-offs. Paul Heckingbottom would not do that.

He is not the first piece but he is an important on into a team that can go places.

Transfer Widow

My girlfriend probably things I am having an affair. Every morning I furtively close my hands around the screen of my trusted N95 and sneak a peek at some covert information, these modern days such actions are tantamount to having lipstick on one’s collar in the list of telltale signs of infidelity.

Every morning I gaze longingly at every loving word crafted to speak of outlandish possibility and I know that such things will never come to pass but we can all dream. Every morning I covertly check out the BBC’s transfer gossip and rumours page.

Sitting all year round the scrapings of tabloid and broadsheet fantasy goes into a kind of meltdown every January when the transfer window opens and a parade of names are stapled to clubs in a cavalcade of would be transfer.

Most concern players few – if any – have heard of joining clubs that simply do not need them. Today we learn with lusty glory that Liverpool boss Rafael Benitez is set to spend £7m on Slovakia international defender Martin Skrtel. – or so the Beeb tells us that the Telegraph tells us – and we raise an eyebrow and ponder if the Anfield club’s failure to mount a serious challenge for the title is really for the want of a player who costs less than Newcastle United paid for Jean-Alan Boumsong.

“Failure to mount a serious challenge” is a phrase that haunts Rafa Benitez’s Liverpool side troublingly. Clearly The Reds are not winning the thing this year but to suggest that they have not mount a challenge is akin to suggesting that Scott and Oates were just having a wander in the snow just because they were beaten to the Pole.

The vowel light Skrtel may be Kendal Mint Cake to Benitez and our job is in the observation. In likelihood Skrtel will not be heard of again being swooped to play for Bryern Munich, Rapid Vienna or Fulham’s Reserves but for a day we can all imagine him wandering down the wing in Red. It is the pornography of the Subutteo generation.

Of course the Mighty Bradford City have not featured in this procession of names and clubs for sometime but this is no bad thing and not something one would complain about although Big Sam will save his job by pairing Michael Owen with Bradford’s Barry Conlon is probably as realistic to us Skrtel’s move to Anfield is to supporters of his – nameless – club.

Realism is not the point. Distraction is.

Football – as previously mentioned once or twice – had gone to Hell in a handcart at anything other than the top level and like the trappings of the French Lord’s of old the purpose of the big name club transfer gossip is to distraction joyless citizenry from the dullness of their every day existence. Never mind the fact your club cannot afford to have the stadium roof fixed – Manchester United are thinking of buying a Belgian who’s agent will take a cut the size of Luton Town’s much talked about debt.

It is football supporting as Hello Magazine reading – a glimpse at how some live with the far flung hope that you might one day move there yourself. Queens Park Rangers suggest that one day it will I guess, and I suppose one day we did too.

So furtively I look at my mobile phone to read this list of pipe dreams and I should be as offended as I am when I see those documentaries on the lavish fineries of Royalty I pay for but have no access to but for some reason I’m not.

So rest assured should you be worried Ria it is not an affair but with lusty eyes trained on what I want but can’t have it is – at least – flirting.