More About 2002/2003
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.