Articles written by Roland Harris
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.
Chesterfield 1 Bradford City 1 - League Two 2007/2008
It rained at Chesterfield and then it rained some more and without a doubt the pitch was unplayable but this is League Two and no one really cares about anything except the blood and the thunder and City set out with Paul Evans in the midfield alongside Nicky Law so we were always going to get some of that but for all the fight in the middle pair the home side had the ball for most of the game or what we could see of the ball that was a brown lump of mud being thudded from one side of the pitch to another and it lacked class but I discovered that Lee Richardson the gaffer of the team that put us down last year was gutted to not win the game but admitted they didn’t deserve to and that is true cause the Bantams are starting to build stern stuff with Joe Colbeck back and running down the right and Omar Daley up front so everything as more secure but I’m never sure why Stuart McCall puts a fast lad up front and I can’t remember us ever out pacing a defence but there is no defence for Kevin Gray today because I still remember the fury and the violence of that tackle he did on Gordon Watson and for a bit my mind wanders back to that day and how exciting Chris Kamara’s Bradford City were before McCall arrived and turned passion into pride and steeled the team for promotion which looked unlikely today when Chesterfield got away at first and scored but the Bantams slogged through mud and Kyle Nix came good in the second half and that was that and both these teams are said to lack consistency but like the rattling prose of this page the only thing constant today was the driving, smacking, wetness of the rain.
Mansfield Town 0 Bradford City 0 - League Two 2007/2008
I had a dream last night that Paul Jewell was really upset about losing to Huddersfield and QPR back in the promotion year and so he decided to drop Stuart McCall and put Paul Bolland in the team. No it wasn’t a dream. It was away at Mansfield without Paul Evans and Peter Thorne.
Now don’t get me wrong I’m not saying that City should have undroppable players in the team and I’m not saying that everything is right when you put these guys in the team but as Macca comes out saying that the team lacks a cutting edge you can’t help but think that that was cause he spent most of the night sitting next to the cannier players we have not only cannier but one’s who give more of a toss.
Omar Daley started really well at Field Mill and could have scored with a shot that pinged the post but he didn’t and in typical Omar Daley fashion his head went down. I don’t believe that a player like Omar should be motivating himself and geeing himself up - that is not his job in the team - but he needs a Stuart McCall alongside him to put rockets up his arse when he does sag.
The same is true of Guylain Ndumbu-Nsungu. As a loan player who coudl be out of work in six months at another club how do we expect him to play his guts out for City. The playing the guts out and making sure everyone else plays guts out has to be someone else’s job and the problem is that someone else is Paul Evans.
To be honest it is a few people who the club don’t have and we need some players with character and a bit of spirit. I have a mental picture of Dean Windass shouting at half the squad and getting them to put in the effort but he has gone now and I’m told even tonight when we are a division below where we were when some Muppets took against the striker that his leaving was for the best.
City are a closed mouth team save Evans who enters late and is no match changer anyway unlike Willy Topp who we are promised soon and while we did not deserve the win we certainly did nothing to deserve getting beaten. Donny Ricketts saved a penalty in the first half from one time target Michael Boulding that David Wetherall gave away by standing too near someone else and the zip zip with the bottom team said it all.
It seems to be believed that the club lacks a bit of dazzle and Stuart McCall talks about opening up defences but for me we lack the graft that will get us out of this league. We need eleven men who will give everything or more likely one man who will force the other eleven to give their all and the really strange thing is that that was Stuart’s job for City.
Had Paul Jewell decided that the problems with City were not that Issy Rankin could not finish a bowl of cornflakes and that Robbie Blake should be brought in off the right wing then where would City be now? If he had decided that the solution was dropping the senior players who tried hardest what would Stuart McCall have thought?