BfB

The mark of excellence in management is not success but repeating success and as brightly as Bradford born Aidy Boothroyd shone in his first appointment where he took Watford to a 3-0 play-off final win over Leeds in 2007 so has the rest of his career been cast in the shade.

Boothroyd’s career ended at 26 owing to injury and and worked his way through youth teams and coaching positions to to becoming first team coach at Elland Road and then manager at Vicarage Road. His year in the Premier League with the Hornets impressed some but his story of relegation and then fading away is not uncommon amongst those who take a club up.

So spells at Colchester United and Coventry City showed signs of being on the brink of blossoming again but never did. He is out of work, looking for a job, and his home town club could offer something.

Which is – perhaps – the nub of the problem with considering Boothroyd as the next City boss. Were he not born in Bradford, and were he not a City fan in his youth, then would he be considered at all? Without “Born in Bradford” on his CV it would not be dissimilar to dozens of other candidates.

However writing Boothroyd off could be a mistake. Looking into his past, and how he talks about his career, the noises he makes have a ring of familiarity.

Professional footballers should be professional. They have a responsibility to come in, listen and learn, watch their performances, analyse where they went wrong and improve. Not to come in, have a five-a-side, bugger off and play golf. I get quite passionate because I was that person. I was a mercenary who went from club to club on a free transfer and, really, that’s not how football should be – Aidy Boothroyd

Boothroyd’s words recall Paul Jewell’s summation on his playing career and his motivation to move into management. Boothroyd talks about football as a mental game and underlines the importance of modern training methods, empowering player’s to take charge of their own performance. He is analytical, business-like, and at times can come off cold. A leap from the emotional whirl of Peter Jackson.

At forty Boothroyd has experience and youth – he took Watford up aged 34 – and there is talk that he is on the shortlist of three for the City job. If the convenience of the appointment can be overlooked, the merits of it might emerge.

Stuart McCall has to stay as Bradford City boss and not because he is a good guy or a Ginger God or a club legend but because sacking him will only make sure we end up in the same situation we are in now in eighteen months time and throws away any good work that has been done at the club leaving us to be run by a much of bitter moaners.

Second point first. Who runs Bradford City?

Is it Mark Lawn and Julian Rhodes representing the supporters who have backed McCall with League Two record attendances or is it forty or so Scrots and a bunch of Chavs on a message board taking time away from posting up racist abuse and commenting on how right the Daily Mail is about everything? If it is the latter then tell me now and I’ll find something better to do with my weekends if it is the former then they should hold a steady line.

First point now. Hold a line because Stuart McCall has just got started at Valley Parade. There is no point in appointing a young manager if after 18 months of doing the job you let him leave. If you want instant results go to Terry Venebles, if you appoint a young manager then you don’t let yourself be forced into letting him leave when he is just working out how the phone system works and where the cones are kept at Applely Bridge.

Patience isn’t a virtue in football, it is a necessity if you want success.

If you are happy to piss away money hiring and firing managers then give them eighteen months each and edge them out the door after that. It is practically proven to fail and for every example of instant success you can find you get pull out ten where changing a manager has made f*ck all almost no difference.

Everyone wants stability at the club. Stability does not start with the next guy it starts here and now with sticking to a manager especially one who is bothered about the club and giving him the time to get things right.

Cause in the end what is sacking a manager (or letting him leave cause some morons have hounded him out)? Is it a punishment for him or for us? Look at the say the muppet crowd got rid of the England manager. Did Sven Goran Erickson go off sobbing while Steve MacLaren took us to European glory? No fecking way. Sven got paid all the same and we had The Wally with the Brolly so tell me who got punished then?

McCall will be gutted to leave City but he will leave and we will be left with a Aidy Bothroyd, a Keith Alexander, a Alan Rape Me Pardew for a year and a half and be wondering why we carry on looking disjointed and have no passion.

How can we demand passion from out players when we get rid of our most passionate player? How can we want a stable club with we keep smashing up any stability we have?

We should not even be talking about Stuart McCall’s position at this club until he has had three or four years. It is not like we are in danger of relegation. We might not go up! Big fat hairy deal! Not going up we should be used to by now. When was the last time with eight games left City even looked like they might get a play off place? 1999?

The club have got to decide who runs it and what it is for. Is it Julian Rhodes and Mark Lawn or it is whoever shouts the loudest? Once that is decided if they could all they need to do is decide if they want to be successful and try doing the same things that work at the clubs who do well (Liverpool have got to sack Benitez ! He sold Robbie Keane! Liverpool don’t have any strikers! Hang on, 4-1!) or just want to piss around wallowing in mistake on mistake until everyone loses interest.

Note Oh yeah, I don’t want comments on this article. If you don’t like what I say then argue all you want, call me whatever you want. What people who want McCall out of City are doing is smashing up my club because they are too vindictive or too stupid to know better. If you are one of these people I don’t want to have a nice little discussion with you. Hell, I’d find it a tough choice to brake at a level crossing for you.

Wasn’t it Paul Jewell who said ‘There are lies, damned lies, statistics and Bradford City’? Oh no, it was something else that Jagger said. Back to that in a minute. No, according to Mark Twain it was Benjamin Disraeli who made that comment – or at least he would have done if he had still been alive back in 1903.

But have a look at the official club website and you’ll see some quite alarming statistics from Saturday’s game. They say, for example, that City, starting a home game as second in the league, had just 29% of the possession, had just half of the number of shots on target as the Daggers and won 4 corners as against their opponents’ 13. Those are the kind of statistics that don’t lie.

At least now I know why the manager keeps his hair as long as it always has been. It’s so that nobody realises how much of it he tears out whenever we gave the ball away – which happened roughly every thirty seconds yesterday. He will soon be as follicularly challenged as the rest of us, especially when we concede possession about 25 yards from our own goal.

Personally, I wouldn’t have minded the Daggers’ corner count being 14, if the extra one had been the ball TJ could just have knocked out of play instead of letting it be put back across the face of Evans’ goal, thereby setting up the equalizer. But come on, be fair to Evans. He’d kept us in it and there was very little he could have done to prevent that goal.

Of course, what the statistics don’t tell you is that, for all that City were outplayed up and down the pitch, there was only one team who were ever going to score that opening goal. I don’t suggest it was fated or anything like that. What I mean is that it took a passing team, operating at pace and a real quality goal scorer to create and score a goal like that. We’ve done it before – Rochdale comes to mind – and we’ll do it again this season. There are ways of soaking up pressure and still scoring goals and we seem to have some of the best ways. They’re called Boulding and Thorne.

Even allowing for the justice in the equalizer, City could have lost the point gained. Apart from the referee, who else thought it wasn’t a penalty? And what about the reaction of the Dagenham players? The last time I saw that sort of scrum round the ref was when Andy D’Urso had the temerity to award a penalty against the home team at Old Trafford and Roy Keane’ eyeballs were several inches away from the sockets. Wasn’t that exactly what the Respect campaign was all about? So how come not a single yellow card resulted from the cavalry charge?

Ah yes, that was what Paul Jewell said. After the recent Derby game against Nottingham Forest he gave the referee 100% in his report card, because he wanted to see if anyone actually read the numbers awarded by the managers. That was the game where the ref gave a penalty for a handball that wasn’t, where quite literally a one second pause would have solved everything, that being the time it took for Derby to put the ball in the net. The penalty was saved and even the second time Derby put the ball in the net the ref found a push, although he couldn’t say by which Derby player. Replays showed two or three from Forest, none from Derby.

And why was I reminded of Paul Jewell? Easy really. That Derby ref was none other that Mr Atwell, he of the phantom goal in the Watford and Reading game and he of the non-penalty and no respect at Valley Parade yesterday. (I gather Derm Tanner’s substitute on Bantams World needed the prompting of John Hendrie to point out that this was the phantom goal ref. Still, given that he also insisted that the cross for Boulding’s goal came from Jones, maybe he could give up the day job and become a linesman.)

I just wondered how a Premiership ref couldn’t book anyone for that confrontation. Then I thought of the absolute howlers he’s made already this season, each of which has cost points for different teams and, for Aidy Boothroyd, a slap on the wrist for his reaction. But yesterday there were no TV cameras, save for the highlights package which will never show the incident. Or maybe Mr Atwell finally figured that, when you have just dug that hole a little deeper, there really must come a time to stop digging. I could almost wish for the return of Graham Poll.

Well, almost.