More About Colin Todd
Prefacing this by saying I like The City Gent and Chris Armstrong who runs The City Gent website we at BfB were interested to see that website use it’s front page to make a case for the prosecution against Colin Todd calling for the City manager to be sacked.
The content of the article runs through a damning list of “crimes” and makes it clear that Todd should be held accountable for the teams performance - a view I personally thing always lets the team off with ineffectual displays but one I respect the writer’s right to hold.
However such talk is neither especially interesting or especially new. Indeed City fans need only cast minds back to October 2003 when the same comments were being made about Nicky Law.
That those comments may - or may not, depending on your opinion - have been proved true is hardly important. What is important and what would be needed to convince me that the Todd Out protests had enough merit to be worth supporting is an answer to the questions asked back when Law was sacked.
For all the talk about from City fans about the relative merits - or lack of merit - of Todd and his position at the club I have yet to hear anything approaching a convincing argument which tells me that sacking this manager would not be as ineffectual in halting City’s decline as axing Law was.
Genuinely curiously I wonder why would sacking Colin Todd improve the club any more than sacking Nicky Law? Or Jim Jefferies? Or Chris Hutchings? Why would the next manager turn our fortunes around when Bryan Robson’s arrival did not? Or when the return of popular coach Terry Yorath as manager in 1988 could not?
By anyone’s yardstick - including the one Colin Todd applies to Sven Goran Eriksson - Todd would be overdue the bullet from the vast majority of jobs in football. What I am interested in - and what we as supporters of this club should be interested in - is the future of the club beyond the short term buzz of a sack and search.
How will the job of managing Bradford City be different for the next manager than it is for this one and it was for the last one, and the one before that, and before him and before him?
I spent much of this evening in debate with an eager reader who asked me how I could still support Colin Todd despite the 2-1 reversal at Milton Keynes Dons this weekend. He is to start a protest against Todd on Saturday - the protest will involve t-shirts - and wanted to know if I would making him a website for it.
I mulled it over - the idea that BfB supported Colin Todd not the idea of doing a free website for someone - and wondered how accurate it was. I flicked back through enough editorials to know that the Gaffer does not have a ringing endorsement from my comments but that there is much talk about the need for continuity.
At this point I cannot imagine the decision Julian Rhodes has to make. Certainly it is true to say that Rhodes’s faith in Todd has been shaken in recent months and with one win in eleven the chairman must be thinking issuing a P45 to a manager he inherited appointed as assistant by Gordon Gibb and then as manager by an administrator.
Rhodes probably knows that axing Todd would give him a popularity boost and lift the mood around Bradford City. Todd’s popularity has hit such low levels it is almost impossible to see it being turned around. The manager who was lambasted for negative tactics for most of the season now picks midfields of passing players - Marc Bridge-Wilkinson, Tom Penford, Steven Schumacher and Owen Morrison are no one’s defensive line up - but having given the fans what they wanted he now carries the can for bad results.
And as results go bad so does mood. City walked onto the field at Milton Keynes a team which looks mentally beaten before a ball is kicked. It could have been the loss of Dean Windass but more likely the mood which effects the fans is deeply rooted in the club. Football is game played mostly in the head and built on confidence and just as in the stands the idea that Todd’s team will win has gone from the dressing room. It does not matter if this is true or not the presence of the idea is enough to curse the side.
In short - and to quote my late Nan - the poor Buggar cannot do right for wrong. I have no idea if Todd has “lost the dressing room” or even what losing the dressing room is but I have seen enough football to know that City are in the sort of situation where a someone would get a pasting in the game after a management change and for a while everything would be right again.
However Julian Rhodes has sat in on the last four management changes at City in some way and the Bantams have gone though the man appointed from within, the experienced professional boss, the young up and coming boss and the top international without any turnaround of fortunes. It would take an especially dense man not to at least pause at the idea of having to go back into the job market to find someone to follow in those footsteps without being worried that the problem is not in another area of the club and that changing the manager is not the so much nothing which it has proved to be over the last half decade.
In all honesty I could not say to Julian Rhodes that any of the candidates likely to apply for the job of Bantams manager would be better than any of the last five bosses who have been in charge at Valley Parade but I’d suspect that a great number of much worse bosses would apply. I could be pretty sure that the change would boost morale and Rhodes would know the cost of that in hard cash. Todd has a twelve month contract to pay off and for the £100,000 plus the chairman gives away the reward is the randomness of appointment and a very good chance that an application process would make hardly any difference whatsoever in anything other than the short term. Chris Kamara was three numbers, Paul Jewell was a big lottery win. Almost every other change has been a zero baller.
So faced with the level of uncertainty Rhodes is stuck in a Catch 22 situation. Todd’s presence at the club is deflating matters to such a point where it is hard to see a win coming - although they always do - but to get rid of him is expensive and repeats an often failing policy of football chairmanship. 99% of the time the new manager is no better than the old one and the whole process of paying off the one, getting rid of players, bringing players in and then eighteen months later sacking is costly and tedious.
So expect Rhodes to do as all chairmen faced with this problem do. He will hold onto Colin Todd for as long as he can because should the team manage to get past fifty points he has less pressure to make a change. Should he need to make the change - and after Saturday that change could be made on Monday morning - then he will fall back on what he is familiar with and appoint David Wetherall as manager until the end of the season. An untried manager coming in with a need to get points quickly. Sure Wetherall might get the wins need but things could go wrong in a bigger way than they are doing now. Such is untried managers.
So why do we back Colin Todd? Because I don’t like gambles being made with my club’s future when the stakes are so high.
Colin Todd still has a job at Valley Parade.
He still picks the team and is right to do so. For the record and for reasons I’ve mentioned ad nausem I’d have him keep that job because I do not believe we would do anything other than harm the club in replacing the manager at this point.
I mention this because watching the media output in recent weeks one could think that the Bradford City job is up for grabs.
Certainly there is a growing idea - rightly or wrongly - that Todd might not be in his position for the medium to long term and the runners and riders to replace him have started to get into position.
Take Dean Windass - the outsider of our four - who honestly pledges loyalty to Todd positioning him as something of a continuity candidate while pointing out his sacrifices for the club. He could be on £10,000 a week at Wigan but he is here and should Todd lose his job then we would do well to remember this point. Of the four we talk about Windass is the rank outsider.
Fan’s favourite for the Todd job - should it come available - is Stuart McCall. McCall was on Football Focus a week ago talking about how he loved Bradford City and would welcome the chance to manager a club after being in many positions at Sheffield United showing his versatility and wide experience. McCall was keeping his name in the ring in response to increased noise from another candidate.
That other candidate for the job that does not exist is Peter Beagrie who was on YTV Soccer Night telling all that he was flattered to be linked to the City job but that Bradford had a very good manager. Beagrie is increasingly being mentioned in connection to City with appearances at book launches, mentioned on Sky Sports on the increase and of course the link in The Sun. Should the job come up then Beagrie would have an outside track compared to McCall but the more links between club and former player continue the more he assumes the position of manager in waiting.
All of which is right and proper. Football is a world of pragmatists and while none of the people mentioned would want Colin Todd sacked - indeed they all would probably prefer that if the City job was to come available it did so at the end of the season allowing them to finish off current jobs - all recognise the inevitability of managerial change at some point and seek to position themselves for that eventuality.
However in the box seat should Todd leave Valley Parade is David Wetherall who moved into talking to the press last week when Todd acquiesced, has a firm friendship with Julian Rhodes who once described him as “The Reason we stayed in the Premiership”, knows the current squad, has shown loyalty and commitment to the club and is available to work immediately.
Windass, McCall and Beagrie may push their names forward but it is Wetherall who would be offered the chance to take over from Colin Todd should be leave Valley Parade especially if that departure came during the season.
Like Chris Kamara and Paul Jewell before him Wetherall would get the chance to show what he could do for the rest of a dead season. Should he make a fist of that all the links and mentions would not be able to push him out.