BfB

Preamble: One

I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desart. Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed:
And on the pedestal these words appear:
“My name is OZYMANDIAS, King of Kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!”
No thing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.
“Ozymandias” / Shelley / 1819

Preamble: Two

I’m trying to remember a line from a poem by Simon Armitage, or rather the wider reading of that poem, but it slips my mind. It describes two men, brothers I think, who meet up after time away and are described as looking at each other though “a telescope now which had once been a mirror.”

Preamble: Three

“You’ll meet them all on the long way back to the middle“
Lester Bangs, 1948 – 1982

Amble

Bradford City last played Huddersfield Town in a league match eighteen years ago. During the nearly two decades the clubs were apart Huddersfield had success, getting to the Premier League for a time, while otherwise maintaining a healthy Second Tier position. Bradford City struggled to get out of the fourth tier, and when they did, they fell back while enjoying moments of glory in two cup campaigns.

Change

You have to wonder what they made of it, those people who had travelled from Huddersfield on a Saturday morning in September 2025. You have to wonder if they had heard from Men of my Age the stories about the tackle, about the three goals from Corners, about Peter Jackson and Geoffrey Richmond, about signing David Wetherall and Lee Duxbury.

Or perhaps they are younger and remember the last time that Bradford City rocked up for a League match and put in a performance so insipid that when relegation followed it was a merciful release. That team, which needed Wetherall on the pitch but had him in the manager’s seat, and that performance is the lowest moment watching Bradford City, and perhaps Town fans did not enjoy seeing a rival laid so low, or perhaps they did, given the schadenfreude that marks this West Yorkshire rivalry,

So that person walks into Valley Parade, the empty vessel, a monument of Geoffrey Richmond’s overweened ambition. A little too big and a lot too empty. A club clad in the refinement of memories of the Premier League, but now wearing clothes that ill fit them, and seem too gaudy. Parkinson, Wembley, Nahki Wells, Wembley, Premier League, Wagner. A telescope now, which had once been a mirror.

And now there are a vexillology of flags and there is a songbook that has the hairs stand up on the neck and there are no empty seats in a crowd of over 24,000, and there is expectation for a Town team who are one of the favourites for promotion with good reason as they start the game, and soak up City’s early attempts at dictating the tempo.

“Well… you’ve changed.”

Since

I will confess to you, dear reader, that I can never really dislike Huddersfield Town as much as I’m invited too.

There is something about the men of the West which is familiar, and similar. At one point both teams had a claim to be one of the best in the country – but it seems unlikely anyone who remembers either would be in the ground today – and the entities which remain are separated by the narcissism of the small difference.

Watching on when Town slipped into the Premier League, perhaps I was the only City fan to feel the pain of nostalgia as they were commercialised, then patronised, then scorned in the same way the Bantams were, but I suspect not. During their second season in the top flight, Sky TV picked out a random man from Dewsbury in the crowd and assumed him to be their soon to be arriving manager. How they chuckled. That division promises much, but makes fools of us all.

As for City, the years have brought wisdom to some, exuberance to others, and these ebullient afternoons at Valley Parade seem like they will never end. This is annus mirabilis. There may never have been a better year to be a Bradford City fan than 2025, and there are three months and a trip to Newcastle of it left.

An early chance for Town’s Taylor is blocked onto the bar by the excellent Aden Baldwin. Perhaps today will be the day that the good times go bad? Following a tight pass by Will Swan, coming from a flick by Antoni Sarcevic and good work by Josh Neufville on the right, Bobby Pointon sweeps the ball into the far off goal. Perhaps not then.

Hudderfield Town manager Lee Grant, who has served his nacent career mainly in the backroom, has set out the team to outnumber the Bantams in midfield, and for a while that was a success, or so it seemed. There might have been a path to goal with Max Power and Alex Pattison unable to stop the ball moving around that middle section but none of this seemed to concern City boss Graham Alexander. Town rack up corners, Town have possession, Town ran into dead ends, Town once were turned back again and again by a u-shaped defensive line that stopped possession turning into chances.

City’s Ibou Touray, pressed in at Left Side Centre Defence, and the returning Matt Pennington alongside Baldwin seem to be relishing the opportunity to assert themselves against a Town side aching to be challenged once, and shirk twice. Town’s number ten, Marcus Harness, drifts around trying to pull Power out of the central position that protects the back three, but Harness finds Tyreik Wright coming in from the left wing back role and gathering him up. By some stretch, Wright has his best game for City, but he had an exceptionally good game.

Bobby

By the time half-time came, the game was over.

City, having struggled to get possession, relished frustrating the visitors. By the time Pointon had scored Huddersfield’s best period had come to an end.

City scored twice, first Pointon again, as he slid to finish at a tight angle following more Sarcevic work and then when Josh Neufville hit a low ball across goal both the rampaging Pointon and the Town keeper, missed it, or perhaps not. Pointon left the stadium with the match ball and the hope to be awarded the goal later. All over, bar the shouting.

And while there were moments, including a goal, which suggested that Huddersfield might make a fist of the game those moments lived mostly in paranoia, and had Will Swan or Max Power had a little more luck City would have had more. The game ended 3-1, but the contest ended an hour before.

So Now Then

What has Alexander done right? Having given up the battle in central midfield to Herbie Kane and Ryan Ledsom, Power and Pattison – and Tommy Leigh when he replaced Pattison on 30 minutes – focused on moving the ball quickly past the opposition central line and so Huddersfield’s man advantage became a disadvantage elsewhere on the field. When that midfield pair were able to move the ball around, and they were, Town found Bradford City players working hard to ensure that no pass that could be picked off was not, and no take of possession was easily done.

In synecdoche, every goal kick Town tried saw two defenders drop to the edges of the six yard box, and the two midfielders take up the deeper central defensive positions, and of course City pressed with an energetic front three but mostly, when the press was beaten, for all the effort expended by the visitors they found themselves a long way from goal and without options.

City, in comparison, had a rapid directness, and a way of tilting the field so that the seven who soaked up four Town playings in the attacking phase, could become five or six taking on the 4-2 of Town’s 4231. The two wide attacking midfielders fit too comfortably behind Neufville and Pennington on one side, Touray and Wright on the other, while they always seemed to be off the chase when those players worked the ball forward.

Three City players intercepted more passes than the whole Huddersfield team. “Having the ball”, Alexander seemed to say, “is one thing, doing something with it another” and so it proved.

Oh

Listening to Huddersfield’s Lee Grant was unedifying. The manager made a Jenga tower of words, each precarious phrase meaning less than the last, and begging to be toppled. It was unacceptable, but we have to accept it. The first half was exactly what he thought it would be. Things have to be put right “very quickly”, as if should the solutions be very quick and known might they not have done that in the days before the game?

It feels cruel to pick apart a managers phrasing following a game, but losing a derby game to a rival emerging from the depth is a time for straight talk, not managerialism, and going back to Huddersfield one probably does not expect the players to be running laps of Leeds Road, so much as watching Grant’s incisive Powerpoint presentation.

It was hard not to recall the times when City, all good meaning and best intentions, were in the process of reducing down the Leagues. Managers tried to make answers by stringing similar ropes of words together, that City might use them to climb to escape, but they did not. The Bantams meet Huddersfield Town again in January, and by that time they may look like a team who has turned around a post-Premier League decline but at the moment they do not.

In the second month of the season and still strong City start to get curious as to where the campaign may lead. A late goal by Cardiff City stop the Bantams enjoying seven days first in the League One table. A trip to South Wales next weekend promises the kind of reality which has been put off another week by this result.

And as a result it is remarkable, and like a Traveller from a far off land. There is a moment when two things eclipsed, each going in different directions, only we’ll meet each other on your way back to the middle.