Articles written by Michael Wood
Bradford City’s players returned to pre-season at the start of one of the more pressured period in the clubs history.
Under the stewardship of the club’s definitive player Stuart McCall the squad are expected to win promotion - and perhaps the odd cup - and the challenge for the same the season after.
A club that has won promotion eight time in 105 years wants to start bursting up the divisions. The feeling is the club play below their weight and the expectation on these players is that they can put an end to this underachievement.
So tasked with this Stuart McCall takes his inspiration from the best Bradford City manager there has been and like Paul Jewell he assembles a squad of senior professionals and exciting younger players.
Most of his recruits in the summer have been over or touching 30. Chris Brandon, Graeme Lee and Paul Arnison are - it is said - to be joined almost certainly Paul McLaren and perhaps also Michael Boulding joining the likes of Peter Thorne and Lee Bullock as senior players already doing laps of Applely Bridge. These are McCall’s McCalls, his Beagries, his Windasses.
Added to them is a small crop of younger players - Kyle Nix, Willy Topp and Joe Colbeck leading them - who look to be the legs and trickery of the experience.
Brandon is expected to take a left flank role opposite Colbeck and with McLaren and Bullock between them feeding the ball forward for two of Thorne, Boulding, Topp, Barry Conlon or Omar Daley. Behind them Arnison, Lee, Bower and Heckingbottom have over 1,075 career games between them. Add McLaren, Bullock, Brandon and Thorne to those and you have eight players with ust under 2,500 league games under their belts.
McCall believes that experience will get the club to achieve. He has staked his reputation on it.
For City fans are fickle from old and forgive little. The word when Stuart signed was the fear and the fear was the McCall would tarnish his position as the club’s hero on his return. Indeed twelve months into his spell in the big chair at Valley Parade criticism of McCall is audible and a recent ad hoc poll of supporters on their favourite player saw the usual winner’s place less firmly held.
Nevertheless McCall answered the call as heroes must do and now attempts his great feat - his Knight’s return - with polar opposites of cementing his place in the pantheon of players who have led on and off the field for the same club or fading away to be a memory of a player who once pounded the streets around Applely Bridge.
We wait, us connected with Bradford City, and we wait.
We have been waiting for Luke Beckett and Michael Boulding to decide who they fancy joining next season and Stuart McCall begins to tire of waiting. The move for Beckett is on hold but one of the player’s other options - Chester City - have been knocked out of the running for the player. It says much about the power of footballers in the modern game that guys on the bench at third tier clubs can keep everyone waiting. Nevertheless Beckett can.
McCall is growing tired of waiting for Michael Boulding but the former Tennis professional turned footballer who went out of the league with Mansfield last season seems awash with options for next season and the ball is very much in his court. He has knocked back City before back in 2001 when he joined Aston Villa rather than opting for to sign with Nicky Law. Within a week the Bantams were in administration and 19 players were redundant. One wonders how much this plays on the players mind when he deals with Rotherham agianst the stability seemingly offered at Valley Parade these days.
We wait for Boulding who has his pick of Yorkshire sides near his home and we wait for Darren Moore who is to talk with Leicester City before deciding his future. In essence The Foxes are offering the same deal as the Bantams - to end his career in promotion - but a division higher and nearer to his home.
This waiting is a good think for City and the people trying to bring Moore to the club. Without McCall, Wayne Jacobs et al then there is little reason for Moore not to dismiss the club in a division below out of hand. The waiting is tribute and shows that Moore is taking City’s approach seriously.
The waiting is hard. The waiting is torture as scribbles on bits of paper with “PA” and “CB” joining “PT” and “JC” in positions in elevens crop up on the desks of City fans everywhere. The waiting is hard.
We wait for Rob Burch the goalkeeper McCall has talked to and we long to do as he did and pop the question in public view to get a binding yes or no. Do you, we would ask Darren Moore, take this hope and manifest it in promotion?
One has to wonder what the reaction of Mark Lawn and Julian Rhodes was at the “failure” of the 9,000 season ticket sale plan that only reached 8,296 adults giving a grand total of 10,707 holders at Valley Parade next season.
If it was not punching the air then it was probably a wry smile because while this is a public failure for the club in private the upside must have been talked about.
Had City sold 705 more season tickets then Stuart McCall would have had around £85,000 more in the kitty but the £1.25m generated will be more than most if not all clubs in League Two have. 95% of last season’s first stab at cheaper tickets has been generated.
The 9,000 free seats could have been filled by potential new supporters - the idea of giving the taste to would be fans for free in the hope that some are converted is a good one for a club that has twice as many seats as season ticket holders - but what atmosphere this would have created has been a worry.
What response would a person who will only go see a team if it costs nothing have had to going a goal down? Are they they sort of person who would by programmes and shirts? How would the paying fan have reacted to the freebies around him? How would he have reacted to having to park further away because of the extra cars from people who did not pay? To wait longer in the queues for the bars or the loos?
Such questions are avoided and while Lawn and Rhodes have a scheme that has failed to reach stated targets one cannot help but think that for many reasons the 700 fewer result is best for all. The 9,000 seats not given away for free can be resold. Commercial Manager David Baldwin must already be planning the Bradford City half-season ticket as the perfect Christmas present.
Should City be riding high then why not sell an 18 month for £200 this December cashing in on any extra interest that a claret and amber side at the top of League Two would have? This would not be possible with 9,000 extra seats claimed if not used.
Lawn and Rhodes could put on a face of failure for sure and for sure many will say this is a defeat but with over 10,000 coming in to see League Two football which is a greater average attendance then we ever got in League One then would be justified in coming out ebullient.
The spin to apply to this is not that the Bantams have failed to reach a target - it is that City are once again the best supported club in League Two.
Cheap season tickets - taking football back to supporters priced out by the sort of rampant increases of the post-Premiership years that have ripped into support levels and put off a generation of fans - is a significant movement in football. It started at Valley Parade last year and is being taken up elsewhere this. If 95% retention is common at Huddersfield Town, at Brentford, and at the other place that have adopted the policy then the permanent revolution in pricing will start to take hold.