More About Premiership
South Leeds is the part of the City that fashion has forgotten but it is in this refuge of the non-business man that having walked from work I looked for a haircut and settled onto a barber who had the most important thing one can find in this search - an empty chair.
I got snug and looked around catching a glimpse of the odd United poster - to be expected - before doffing my glasses and waiting for the cut. The rule with barbers is small talk and so we killed time before inevitably getting onto football and the Champions League final on Wednesday.
“Coke vs Pepsi” I offered attempting to close down the conversation. I sensed he wanted more so I continued “But I guess Man United, what with being Northern…”
“I hate Man Yoo,” he replied, “Because I am Leeds.”
He was and in the middle of Leeds he has a right to be. He snipped well and quickly so I tried to press him for more saying “I thought Leeds hated Chelsea too.”
He said that he would rather both teams lost the game - if only that were possible - and that if the fans were all sent to Siberian prisons then he would not be upset. It amused me and I laughed only for his hands to roughly grab me ensuring even sideburns.
“I don’t care.” he declared “I’m going to Wembley and we are going up.” and for a moment a rush of conversation ran though my head. We should be kin - this barber and me - for we have no interest in this Moscow Show and we long for the success of our own clubs.
We are the best of rivals but not enemies. We can agree on this point and build common ground from there. The interests of clubs outside the less than a dozen that make up the haves in football are best served by recognising that Leeds United, Bradford City, Ipswich, Yeovil Town, Exeter and on and on have more in common than we do separating us.
Here in this barbers shop in South Leeds we could join on this point.
“Perhaps a bomb will go off and both Man Yoo and Chelsea will be killed?” he smiled and started to finish my hair with a razor.
His cutthroat razor flicking down the back of my neck.
We are the two of us alone in his shop and bomb idea hanging in a pregnant pause between us. A long, sharp blade flicking my neck as he asks me “Who do you support?”
Well what would you say?
Bradford City 1 Morecambe 0 - League Two
There was a nervousness - a sense of being on edge - in the last five minutes of this one goal victory over a Morecambe side who’s defeat at Christie Park represented a nadir of City’s season which was entire out of keeping with the comprehensive nature of the win and left a sense of what could have been for the Bantams after another promotion contender was moved aside with relative ease.
Those who witnessed the gutless display away in the North West came back with a worry about City’s ability to turn around the slide and the season but as a confident Bantams recorded the sort of 1-0 win which left a questions as to how the home side did not score more the answer seemed to lay in the vigour, zest and belief which characterised the display.
Nowhere is that belief better shown than in Joe Colbeck. Joe Colbeck - a player who this time last year was said to “divide fans” between those who thought he would never amount to a professional footballer and those who thought he deserved a chance. Very few would have said that this time next season he would strut across the field prompting moves, making play, setting up goal as a part of the best passing move of this and many seasons for the Bantams.
Nevertheless Colbeck’s intelligent running and low cross from the inside left gave Eddie Johnson the chance to score a scruffy but well deserved goal. After the game Stuart McCall would comment that Johnson had been forced to play out of position as a midfielder signalling that Eddie was to be consider a spare Peter Thorne for next term. Johnson took the injured Thorne’s place in the forward line with Barry Conlon playing just behind him and the pair toiled all afternoon calming the single strike but being unlucky not to get more. Conlon headed against the bar in the first half only to see Omar Daley flick the rebound over - Thorne’s miss against Rotherham has a rival now - and at that time as the Bantams waited for the inevitable goal in what was a one sided there were nerves which Johnson would ease.
Indeed it says much about the team’s display that on the whole Scott Loach was a spectator during his first game against a former club and when called into action he barely had to stretch himself. One doubts he will be at Valley Parade next season and with Donovan Ricketts not getting past Heathrow - or perhaps being lost in a bag in Terminal Five - City and McCall are looking for a new shot stopper at a time when the team is benefiting most from the build up of relationships and partnerships.
The longer Tom Penford gets in the side the more useful he looks and he and Kyle Nix did enough to stop any threat coming through the middle for the Shrimps. Injury to Garry Thompson - a thorn in City’s side back in October and subject of a Bantams bid - robbed the visitors of their main thrust of creativity and aside from a smattering of attacks forwards the end that seemed more nervous in the crowd than they did on the field they offered very little. Indeed had it not been for the customary cacophony of Mavis Riley’s as the final whistle drew near with only a single goal advantage then this game would have been stress free.
This too can be credited to the display of an inspired Mark Bower - skipper for the day on the occasion of the tenth anniversary of his debut - who’s performance alongside David Wetherall sapped hope from the visitors.
So it seems the more that Stuart McCall and his team stay together and play together the better they are getting and the season is ending a month too soon for a play off push. Much is hoped for next season by all and perhaps rightly so. I hear that this has been a transitional season for the Bantams - Julian Rhodes reported the superb news that City had broken even for the first time since Bower was a teenager - and one that sets up the promotion push for next year but for me there has been a real achievement in 2007/2008.
For the first time since that day in May 1999 a negativity seems to have started to shift from the club. The Premiership years were characterised not - as the history books are written - but pure glory then pure failure but by the constant sense of impending doom and the years after were a decline but if that decline reached a pit then it was in the last minute goal at Christie Park that mean that the Bantams lost to a team who were in the Unibond when we were in the Premiership leaving us looking at Farsley Celtic as a rival the season after rather than Leeds United and the reality check, the wake up calls, the smell of the coffee afterwards has been realised and is manifested here and now by McCall’s team as the signalled not a revenge but a renewal in this win.
The Bantams have been at bottom, now for the way up. And they say Stuart McCall has not done anything in his first season as a manager…
I guess that it can be difficult to adjust to life in the fourth division when your team has had a brief spell, two seasons around the turn of the millennium, in the Premiership. The eight consecutive seasons spent in the top two divisions saw so many changes to Bradford City’s stadium in particular and professional football in general that for those who had become supporters only after the promotion of 1996 the surroundings of League Two must be quite a shock.
Some of us, of course, had spent most of our lives watching third and fourth division football at Valley Parade and at away grounds of similar standard. The 1985 fire may well have brought about the biggest structural changes to the old ground, but there have been plenty more since. When we had played for so very many years in a ground with only 4,000 wooden seats and plenty of vast open terracing, the development of an all-seater, 25,000 capacity stadium with modern facilities suggested to the old hands that football really was changing for the better.
For those of us who watched our football back in the sixties at decrepit grounds, where toilets were, shall we say, basic and corporate boxes were about as real as the Tardis, the changes throughout the eighties and nineties seemed to befit the new era. We wanted to be treated as ‘customers’, not just as turnstile fodder. We wanted to bring our children along, knowing that they would be safe and comfortable. The nostalgic days when the youngest spectators were lifted over the heads of the almost exclusively male adult fans, so that they could sit at the edge of the pitch and see what was going on, were dead long before Mr Justice Popplewell and Lord Taylor were publishing their reports into safety at football grounds.
Those of us who had been young supporters in the sixties and seventies had lived through the escalating violence at and around football. If we had thought so far ahead as to wonder whether we would allow our own children to come with us to games, we would surely have shuddered at the prospect of bringing them into such an atmosphere. Much as we wanted to encourage them to be the next generation of supporters for our local team, we could not have risked bringing them to Valley Parade or any other ground.
I hope my fellow-survivors of the fire will forgive me for saying that perhaps we were fortunate to be Bradford City supporters from the late eighties onwards. We had already paid in advance a very high price for the progress that came in the next twenty years and are still paying a rather different, purely financial price for the promotions of the nineties. Victories on the field were watched from ever-improving stands; from more and more seats; and even after three-course lunches from in-house caterers.
The outsider would probably argue that the lurch back to the bottom division was attributable to the way the club was managed after the Premiership years, to the previous chairman’s ‘six weeks of madness’, to the two spells in administration and, generally, to that familiar malaise of modern football, overspending. We deserved what we got and shouldn’t complain about watching fourth division football.
Most of us don’t complain, although we wouldn’t be human if we didn’t compare the facilities at Valley Parade with those at grounds we haven’t visited for a few years. Not all lower league grounds are still rooted in the 1980’s. Some clubs have excellent modern stadiums, even though their teams are playing in Leagues One and Two. Others have at least a partial excuse for poorer facilities, having just come up from The Conference and with very limited finances to develop their grounds.
But it’s not just about seats and prawn sandwiches. What has really changed for the better in professional football is the attitude towards spectators. Directors have realised that they have to run their clubs on commercial lines. They have to treat their supporters more as customers. Safety is still an issue, so visiting fans are kept apart from home supporters. Stewards are not there just to show people to the right seat. It isn’t quite like working in a theatre. But then the Romeo supporters at the Old Vic don’t hurl insults at the Juliet fans, do they?
Bradford City supporters should be the last people to argue that other clubs should spend more on improving their grounds. Those who live in glass stadiums, etc. But attitude costs very little. I was quite getting the hang of being a ‘customer’. Some of the grounds where I have been spending my money of late have not had the facilities I had been accustomed to. But the clubs in question usually had genuine explanations and almost always gave advance warning. If I hadn’t been prepared to risk the uncovered terracing at Accrington, I needn’t have gone. They told us in advance, our club printed that warning in the programme and I went with my eyes open.
Other clubs have given me a choice of standing in the open or sitting under cover. Macclesfield, for example, told us in advance that there would be a limited number of seats available, so we got there in good time to make sure we were not left out in the open. They realise that not all visiting fans want to stand outside. Some do, but we less young ones have become accustomed to covered seating. So, within their understandably limited resources, well done to Macclesfield for giving us a choice.
And so it was that my travels around the fourth division had persuaded me that even the lower league teams had accepted the need to look after the fans, as far as finances permitted, and that they didn’t assume we were all teenage hooligans. But all that confidence in the better, more customer-friendly game came to an abrupt end at Edgeley Park, the home of Stockport County.
I’d been there as an away fan not that long ago. Three years back, on an early season sunny Saturday, we had had the ‘Macclesfield’ choice, except that the open area was seating, because Stockport had spent some time in what was then called the First Division, where all-seater stadiums were compulsory. This time around it was early March and the weather forecast was for strong winds and driving rain. So, once again I wanted to make sure I got a seat in the covered area. There’s nothing quite as bad as sitting in the pouring rain. If you are uncovered, somehow it feels better to stand up and get wet.
What a disappointment, then, to discover that, contrary to previous recent experience and in the absence of any pre-match advice, we were not allowed into the covered seats. They were to be kept empty. There wasn’t even the old explanation about keeping the fans apart. As I said, three seasons back we could sit in there, with the home fans much further down the touchline and well away from the visitors. But this time those covered seats were just empty, as if to taunt those of the visiting fans who really would have liked the opportunity to sit under cover.
A few tried to shelter from the driving rain by walking to the corner nearest to the empty seats, where the stand provided some protection from the strong wind and rain. The reports of the stewards’ reaction to that harmless and understandable movement do not make happy reading in the context of customer care. The situation was exacerbated for me by the news from a friend that he had been to the same ground earlier in the season and seen visiting supporters, admittedly in much lower numbers, in those same empty seats.
I thought all of football had long since cottoned on to the notion that for every young lad who was prepared to stand in the pouring rain with his shirt off there were three or four couples who wanted to bring their children into a comfortable environment. It’s called customer choice and, while football cannot safely give the fullest range of such choice, in most cases it costs very little and in all cases it encourages the very supporters professional sport needs to attract.
At the start of the week when 700 Bradford City fans turned up at Edgeley Park their club had just won a Football League award for a revolutionary ticket pricing scheme aimed entirely at making football affordable in one of the best appointed grounds in the lower leagues. Maybe we have got too accustomed to safety, comfort and affordability, all in one package. I know that if I’d been seeking to make a good impression and achieve a higher income for Stockport County, I would have taken heed of that weather forecast and given the visiting fans the option of paying the same price the Stockport fans paid at Valley Parade to sit in covered seats. Maybe the Football League could think about how it wants its clubs to treat their fans and advise on minimum standards (finance permitting) of customer care.