BfB

The Football Association have warned City that the club’s disciplinary record has been poor and that the Bantams could be face a very unwelcome a severe financial penalty should it not improve. This makes me mad.

The club can ill afford a fine at this point in it’s recovery from administration, indeed while a £35,000 fine would have been gobbled up by a Premiership club such a figure now represents the wage of a player for half a year. Such a punishment should be incentive enough for a club like City to avoid trouble and sharpen up the discipline at the club but there is no way that we will be able to do that with the current state of Refereeing dishing out cards in a seemingly ad hoc manner.

Which of these sending offs did we deserve?

• Peter Atherton at Rotherham
  Aside from the fact that Martin MacIntosh deserved a red in that game which was not given Atherton did not even connect with the tackle he was sent off for. It was acknowledged at the time as a very poor decision.
• Mark Bower at home to Burnley
  Opposing forward cheated to have him sent off, something that was obvious to everyone except Ref Mike Dean.
• Danny Cadamarteri at home to Burnley
  Opposing full back faked elbow in face to have him sent off, something that was again obvious to everyone except Ref Mike Dean.
• Stephen Warnock at home to Derby
  Bad, bad foul on Mark Bower, Warnock reacts, the Derby player’s red card is later given to our Liverpool loanee after an appeal which one could argue represents a discipline problem at Liverpool, not Valley Parade.
• Simon Francis at Grimsby
  Two stupid tackles in injury time. Deserved to go.
• Wayne Jacobs at Millwall
  A man ran out of play with the ball and Jacobs tackle occurred off the field. Sue Wayne by all means but this is never a red card.
• Jamie Lawrence at home to Sheffield Wednesday
  Jamie jumps along with another player, both land without a foul, Danny Maddix asks for Jamie to be sent off and he is. Jamie fumes.
• Gus Uhlenbeek at home ot Sheffield United
  Massive lunge on the wing although had not been booked or spoken to before but probably deserved to go.

Eight red cards, two or perhaps three of them that should have stood.

The point is this: The FA are judge and jury in this trial. The Referee’s make the decisions, the FA oversee those decisions and then enforce punishments. The letter that The FA have sent City says the Bantams have “one of the poorest records in First Team matches of all the Clubs dealt with by the Football Association”. Perhaps City should use the eight examples above and reply that our problems are more down to the fact that the Football Association have allowed a situation where the poorest Refereeing standards in living memory now exist in Division One and perhaps are evident at Valley Parade and at Bradford City games more often than other grounds, hence the bad discipline.

We have a few problems discipline-wise at Valley Parade, problems that will return with yellow card a game Paul Evans back in the side, but no more than other sides we have seen at Valley Parade this year. That is a side issue to problem when The FA start throwing their collective weight around.

To be threatened by The FA about discipline is like trying to argue a speeding ticket. City could take a video of every yellow and red card we have had last year to the discipline panel to prove The FA wrong but, as luck would have it, The FA runs the discipline panel. Judge and jury.

Nicky Law says there is a problem with the number of yellow cards we pick up for silly things, shirt tugging and the like, and he is right but for every dodgy red there are three or four dodgy yellows that one forgets about but they are no less travesties. Appealing red cards maybe pointless but appealing yellows is simply impossible even if the Referee public admits he made the wrong decision the card stands.

So if a Mike Dean decides it’s pick on City day again next season the Bantams could be forced to let one of the squad go in the summer to pay a fine that we may not have earned and will have no appeal against. The word for that is totalitarian state by the way and if it existed in a country Shrub Bush would be sending in the Marines.

Marc-Vivien Foe died this week. It’s a tragedy and while no one would want to diminish the loss of anyone’s friends or relatives the details of Foe’s death seem to make that tragedy worse.

Foe, a 28 year old physically fit man, should not drop dead on a football field. His wife Marie-Louise Foe said Marc-Vivien had been struggling with illness. “He should not have been playing at all. He had dysentery for two or three days. He also had gastric problems and he knew he probably wasn’t well enough to play.” she said. Foe, it appears, had been desperate to play in the game in front of his home fans at Lyon.

This week City’s players returned to pre-season training after not kicking a ball since the start of May. It will be six weeks until the season starts yet Foe and for that matter Thierry Henry, Robert Pires, Alpay and the other players at the Confederations Cup who play in the Premiership are still carrying on a season that with the Japanese Wolrd Cup proceeding it barely had a preparation period.

French public prosecutor Xavier Richaud said of Foe’s death

“It is surely cardiac, but we need to make further anatomical and toxicological tests. But one can’t draw conclusions.”

I am not a medical man. I am not an expert on stress levels on the body and I am not making a decisive statement but when a physically fit man drops dead and all that can be found wrong with him is “gastric problems” is it not times to examine the rigours that football is putting on it’s players?

Arsene Wenger said as a complaint about the tiredness levels his players will suffer next season in an interview before Wednesday that no one would remember the Confederations Cup of 2003 in 2013. Sadly now they will and the sight of Foe, eyes rolled over on the field, will speak a thousand times louder than Wenger has managed to do. Will anyone listen?

The Italian courts have been arguing over procecutions for motor racing men Frank Williams and Patrick Head over the death of Ayrton Senna for years with the idea being that Senna was sent out to his death owing to the Williams team’s negligence, that although Williams and Head did nothing to cause the accident that killed Senna, they knew that there was a risk of a potentially fatal accident occurring and that that would make them liable for manslaughter charges.

From August 2001 to June 2003 an International Premiership footballer playing in the World Cup in 2002 and the Confederations Cup 2003 may have played over 100 high-pressure games in just under 100 weeks. While the situation is not the identical it is within the same area and questions should be asked if only to get an answer to “Why does 28 year old physically fit man die playing football?”

Marc-Vivien Foe is part of a generation of footballers who play more stressful, higher paces and more intense football than any that have followed it and they do it more often for more of the year. The human body has a breaking point and what football, from managers like Arsene Wenger in the Premiership to Sepp Blatter at Fifa, need to find out is has playing too much football contributed to Marc-Vivien Foe passing his?

Popular wisdom: Simon Francis had to be sold because City are in administration. Balderdash! Simon Francis should not have been allowed to leave Valley Parade.

No one at Bradford City at the moment has authority to sell Francis for what is a modest amount. If this club were not in administration then this is not an unturndownable offer for a player. £250,000 for one of our finest performers as we fight relegation? If we were not in administration then this would be called footballing suicide.

However we are in administration so we have to take whatever money is offered right? Wrong.

City are currently in a period of funded administration and have at least one confirmed offer on the table for the club. The Rhodes family have financially guaranteed this period of administration and, as is my understanding, have put in an offer to buy the club at the end of it.

Administration was called “a technicality”, something that could not be avoided but would not seriously effect the running of the club, and we were not to worry about the future which would be assured under the Rhodes family. For the record I still believe it will be but this is not about Julian and/or David Rhodes.

It is about the administrators who have received more than the single Rhodes bid to buy Bradford City as of Friday afternoon. When the club was made available for sale the playing squad was given a value of none although since then Andy Gray and Simon Francis have left for cash leading anyone who would be interesting in buying the club wondering how come the assets are marked down and why what is of value at their potential purchase is being sold.

Administrators are not asset strippers or liquidators. It is not their function raise money only to keep the club going until a deal that best suits the creditors is made and that administrative period had been guaranteed by the Rhodes family.

So if the administrators did sell Simon Francis then how could they be said to be acting in the best interests of the creditors? 19 year old footballers very rarely go down in value and Francis was, as I understand it, on very reasonable terms at Valley Parade.

Unlike seeing the back of Benito Carbone, Ashley Ward, Stan Collymore, Dan Petrescu, David Hopkin and just about every other face to leave VP in the past few years we did not need to get Simon Francis off the wage bill. His was the kind of wage club’s dreams are made of – good players on low money – and just as it is understood by all when a business goes into administration that it needs it’s staff to continue to run to allow the best deal for creditors a football club needs footballers.

We did not need to get Simon Francis’ modest wage off our wage bill to help us in administration – Hell it probably appears on the balance sheet as tiny next to the amounts being paid out to Ashley Ward to not play for us – and so administrators had no business selling him.

If it was not the administrators then perhaps it was on the order of the Rhodes family who, it is assumed, will be taking control of City after administration? I doubt that the Rhodes could have had much of a hand in this as a potential buyer of the club but if they had then they should not have been allowed to. They are one of a number of potential buyers and have no remit in changing what has been put up for sale after the event.

Like I say though it was probably not the Rhodes family and we all look forward to the day when they can complete the takeover of City and we can stop being subject to the financial melee we seem to find ourselves in and get some stability.

So if it was not the administrators, and one hopes it was not, and it was not the Rhodes family then who did sell Simon Francis? In my mind neither have enough of a remit to justify making this sale.

Perhaps it was someone at the club. One hopes it was not Shaun Harvey because he seems too canny a chap to allow the club to be raided like this and as chief executive he also does not have the remit to decide who stays and who goes. He enacts decisions made by the board or in this case administrators (and as said above they should not have been making them and by whoever is in control of the playing side which at the moment is Bryan Robson.

Robson has no remit to start selling players unless he puts pen to paper on a contract for next season.

It’s that simple. Until Bryan Robson commits to next season then he should not be getting rid of players who are contracted longer than he is. If Robson walks away in a few months time then the new manager will find a huge hole in the team where Simon Francis used to be and would justifiability ask how he is expected to bring in a player of similar quality for £250,000 should he get a transfer budget which one seriously doubts. A new manager might also look at Andy Gray and ask why no contract offer was made. He might wonder if this club had any concept of long term planning and he could be right if he concluded that we did not.

Robson can walk away and if he was the one who rubber-stamped Simon Francis leaving he can walk away leaving us much less of a squad than we had when he arrived. We accept that in the name of rebuilding but only if the one doing the releasing will be doing the signing in the summer. In my opinion Robson does not have the remit to start selling our players until he makes it clear that they are his players.

So who has sold Simon Francis? I’m sure that one of the parties I’ve talked about has a good reason why we have sold one of our brightest prospects for what most would say is a disappointing fee but frankly I am unable find a reason.

Despite the popular misconception we do not need the money short term for administration because that time is being funded by the Rhodes family. We do not need to get Simon off the wage bill to make the club work financially in the medium term because his wage is not an issue next to those going out to the likes of Ashley Ward on one hand and the host of not good enough players like Robert Wolleaston and Luke Cornwall on the other and in the longer term any profits we can get from selling him are only enhanced buy having him at the club as he develops which is saying nothing about the increased chance of avoiding relegation we have with him in the side.

Three summers ago we weighed up who “The most exciting signing in the club’s history” could be before seeing the dominative Italian walking into a maelstrom.

Benito Carbone was the zenith of the summer of madness and now that the battle that began between Geoffrey Richmond and some at the club has been won and the history written by the winners Carbone was always a bad idea.

He was a giddy head rush of an idea. He was starting on a bottle of Jack Daniels while lounging on your freshly cut lawn knowing that you will pay for the hangover and that you had not finished the weeding. He was football transfer as binge.

Like all head rushes it felt great at the time.

Today things are different. Bradford City are making a major signing at a Press Conference at Valley Parade this afternoon but no one is whispering and rumouring. The club sign Alan Combe seems to be the most popular assessment of the events although names from Danny Forrest to Teddy Sheringham have been mentioned.

We have modest ambitions these days.

When Carbone signed many thought City had spring boarded into the top half of the Premiership. Even if today’s major signing was the little Italian there are few who would thing that this one player would face anything more than a play off push at the very best.

Perhaps we have learned something in the time between August 8th, 2000 and today. We have seen Benito Carbone and a cast of others including Stan Collymore, Ashley Ward, Dan Petrescu, David Hopkin et al be able to do nothing individually and in some cases collectively against the decline of the Bantams.

Add to that the catastrophic wages of Carbone that caused a strut on the day but cost so much in the longer term.

The lesson is that you cannot focus on one man and ignore other problems. That whomever we sign today the aim of the game is to get the best out of the squad.

Promotion in 1999 depended not on the great works of Stuart McCall and Peter Beagrie but on the fact that work a day squad men like Robbie Blake and Jamie Lawrence emerged as quality players. If we are to get on at this club then it is not important if we sign Alan Combe, Danny Forrest or Teddy Sheringham, it matters that we get the best out of Michael Standing and Danny Cadamarteri.

That said though if we break the bank to sign Freddy Adu I’ll be wandering away from VP a happy man.

Bradford City vs Crystal Palace was the ironic fixture. We had lost to a goal that never was, they had been beaten by Leeds after scoring a good goal.

Video replays, that was the phrase of the day.

Pause the game and take a look at a screen to tell you if a goal is good or bad. There is much weight on goals and results these days, lots of money riding on it, so it’s important to get these decisions right. So the thinking goes.

The thinking is right of course but it goes against the one principal of football. That the game played between Brazil and Germany in the World Cup final is the same game that AFC Wimbledon play at the bottom of the football pyramid. Unless you can do it at Wimbledon, you cannot do it at the greatest games in the land.

It’s good guiding principal. It keeps the mobility, or at least the idea of the mobility, between the levels of the game alive. “Once they cross the white line…” and all that.

Besides. Where is the goal not scored? It’s fairly clear that Palace should have had a goal against Leeds but had Michael Duburry, who’s hands were hit by the ball over the line, been two feet forward then would that have been less of a goal?

Should you not use video replay for that? Why would you stop at just goal line decisions once a precedent is set? Why not use it for decisions like the red cards that City suffered against Burnley. Yes Mike Dean is a rubbish Ref but it’s better than playing until seven thirty on a Saturday night because we stop every two minutes.

Besides, if video replays we useful for anything that weekend then it would have been the massed ranks of officials and Gooners watching Ryan Giggs miss and open goal again and again and again…

I was reading a few papers, looking at a few websites and getting a handle on what other people were saying about Bradford City 2 Burnley 2.

A few of the reports I looked at disagreed on the Mark Bower incident. Some said that Bower committed two bookable offences, some that the Burnley striker Dimitrios Papadopoulos had been guilty of diving and one or two even went as far as to suggest that Papadopoulos should be carpetted.

With Danny Cadamarteri opinions were different.

I must confess that when I saw the incident I thought that Cadamarteri had polaxed Colin West with his elbow. I saw it again on TV and thought about how from my perspective I would have sent Cadders off, but from where the Referee Mike Dean was standing, an angle where he had a clear view of the ball looping over the City man and landing full in Colin West’s face, I would have called for a physio for the prone Burnley man and been a little curious as to why he was staying down so long.

Danny Cadamarteri didn’t touch him, but that’s not the point, Danny Cadamarteri didn’t have to. Danny Cadamarteri is always guilty.

A look through those match reports and words like “Unsurprisingly” and “Typically” appear near mentions of Cadamarteri’s alleged elbow.

It all goes back to Cadamarteri’s time at Everton. Fact: He was found guilty of hitting a woman. Fact: He was found guilty of lying to police. I’m not keen on either of these things.

Cadamarteri suffers the same problem as Stan Collymore did. High profile bad behaviour has a way of staining the character forever.

Cadamarteri, like Collymore, might not be on your list to invite to a dinner party but the idea that he should get different treatment from writers and pundits is harsh. Watch the game, write about the game. However if it’s your website or your editor approves what you said then fair play to you.

However when Referee’s act differently towards one player to another because he has “high profile bad behaviour” issues then we have a problem in the game.

Did the Ref come onto the field thinking “I will send Danny Cadamarteri off cause he hit a lap dancer”? Probably not. Did he think that Cadamarteri is “the sort of guy who is useful with his fists”? It would explain why he interpreted a ball in the face as an elbow.

Stan Collymore said that Refs had victimised him, I think Danny Cadamarteri might one day say the same.

Roy Keane ghostwrites

“I’d waited almost 180 minutes for Alfie, three years if you looked at it another way. Now he had the ball on the far touchline. Alfie was taking the piss. I’d waited long enough. I fucking hit him hard. The ball was there (I think). Take that, you cunt. And don’t ever stand over me again sneering about fake injuries. And tell your pal David Wetherall there’s some for him as well.”

This article would not be on BfB if the Manchester United skipper did not mention the Bradford City skipper but the sentiments expressed are no less valid for the connection. Wetherall’s inclusion is a motivation but the truth is that all football should be speaking in one voice on this issue.

That voice should say: “Roy Keane should never be allowed to play football again”.

The book is Keane’s mea culpa. He looked like a thug, he played like a thug and now we see he has the prose style and attitude to match. It is unnecessary of course. I have watched Stuart McCall play the holding role in midfield with as much aggression as anyone, but he was only sent off once in over twenty years.

You could trust Stuart McCall never to try hurt another player. Trust is a key factor.

Football is a game built on a trust that players will play with a single motivation of trying to win games through fair means. Yes it is not true, we have all seen foul means used to win games and on occasion we have seen City use those means to win, but the trust is there.

Roy Keane breaks that trust.

Kevin Gray does not. His assault on Gordon Watson was the worst thing I had seen on a football field I would not be upset if the guy had gone to Armley but what he did was out of anger. It was clearly not premeditated.

The likes of Diego Maradona and Diego Simeone both cheated England in the past but they did it out of an all consuming desire to beat the old enemy. That does not break the trust.

Premeditation does. Keane stepped on the field with the aim of hurting a player and for me that should be the end for him.

Football can forgive mistakes, it can forgive acts of passion, but it should have no room for the vicious malicious targeting of opponents for assault.

Of course Roy Keane will not be thrown out of football. He is too valuable, he is too well paid, he is too Manchester United but what if the third round of the FA Cup throws up Manchester United coming to Valley Parade. What do you do with a player who has threatened to try end the career of another?

It’s not fair on the others to suspend Keane for games against David Wetherall so the only conclusion is to stop him from playing because there is no way that you could ask a professional like Wetherall to take the field knowing that one of the other side wants to break his leg.