More About Stuart McCall
Darren Moore has just signed for Barnsley after City boss Stuart McCall told everyone that he wanted to bring the big man back to Valley Parade and for the second time I’m left feeling a bit used.
Moore is a good guy cause he is a Christian and knows Wayne Jacobs and everyone will tell you that he is a good bloke. In fact footballers like him so much that they elect him to the PFA. He sits around the table with Gordon Taylor when the footballer’s union make sure that no one get get anywhere when they suggest that players need salaries capped.
He is a good bloke and never made a noise after having his request for £15,000 a week from City turned down nine years ago. He went to Portsmouth and on to a great career that we all followed and cheered with only a bit of a bitter taste in the mouth about the way it all ended.
Great guy but when City came in for Moore how come it got out to the media so quickly? And what was the effect of it getting out. To us it said that City had high ambitions but to the rest of the game it said two things. First that Bruno was on the move and secondly that to get him you needed to compete with big spenders.
So the likes of Leicester City and Nottingham Forest all start to be interested and soon it looks like City’s hope if plucking Moore’s heartstring and pushing a bit of extra cash in his pocket to get him but when a club two divisions higher want to offer the chance of a fifth promotion to the Premiership of course he is interested.
So fast forward on the month and Bruno has got a move to the Championship probably on the money that City offered him and no one can blame him but for the second time City have figured in a deal that ended up with Darren Moore getting what he wanted and us being left with egg on our faces.
Graeme Lee is not Darren Moore in our hearts but neither was David Wetherall when he was signed the last time Moore decided he wanted to be somewhere else and maybe in nine years time we will look at Lee like we look at Weathers now.
Bradford City’s players returned to pre-season at the start of one of the more pressured period in the clubs history.
Under the stewardship of the club’s definitive player Stuart McCall the squad are expected to win promotion - and perhaps the odd cup - and the challenge for the same the season after.
A club that has won promotion eight time in 105 years wants to start bursting up the divisions. The feeling is the club play below their weight and the expectation on these players is that they can put an end to this underachievement.
So tasked with this Stuart McCall takes his inspiration from the best Bradford City manager there has been and like Paul Jewell he assembles a squad of senior professionals and exciting younger players.
Most of his recruits in the summer have been over or touching 30. Chris Brandon, Graeme Lee and Paul Arnison are - it is said - to be joined almost certainly Paul McLaren and perhaps also Michael Boulding joining the likes of Peter Thorne and Lee Bullock as senior players already doing laps of Applely Bridge. These are McCall’s McCalls, his Beagries, his Windasses.
Added to them is a small crop of younger players - Kyle Nix, Willy Topp and Joe Colbeck leading them - who look to be the legs and trickery of the experience.
Brandon is expected to take a left flank role opposite Colbeck and with McLaren and Bullock between them feeding the ball forward for two of Thorne, Boulding, Topp, Barry Conlon or Omar Daley. Behind them Arnison, Lee, Bower and Heckingbottom have over 1,075 career games between them. Add McLaren, Bullock, Brandon and Thorne to those and you have eight players with ust under 2,500 league games under their belts.
McCall believes that experience will get the club to achieve. He has staked his reputation on it.
For City fans are fickle from old and forgive little. The word when Stuart signed was the fear and the fear was the McCall would tarnish his position as the club’s hero on his return. Indeed twelve months into his spell in the big chair at Valley Parade criticism of McCall is audible and a recent ad hoc poll of supporters on their favourite player saw the usual winner’s place less firmly held.
Nevertheless McCall answered the call as heroes must do and now attempts his great feat - his Knight’s return - with polar opposites of cementing his place in the pantheon of players who have led on and off the field for the same club or fading away to be a memory of a player who once pounded the streets around Applely Bridge.
I’ll admit it. I never saw it in Nathan Doyle.
Yeah, yeah, yeah I know what you are all thinking. Here comes Harris trying to be all controversial again but as honestly as we all realised it wasn’t in Bruno Rodriguez or Ashley Ward and just did not see what Doyle had that made him player of the season.
He was a right back and a decent enough one but he looked raw around the edges and it seemed that his greatest attribute was not being Darren Holloway and when he left around the same time as Dean Windass the Bantams had a massive down turn but it was more to do with losing Deano than Doyle and I think the way their Hull City careers have gone have proven that.
Doyle was very good but player-of-the-season reason-we-got-relegated? Not so much.
But Doyle did have some talent. He could use a ball for sure but he could use his body too and he had some positional sense although that needed a bit of experience. He had a cool head under pressure and he passed the ball using his brain as much as his feet. None of these skills were as polished as they should have been but he was learning and in his months at Valley Parade he showed visible improvement.
The longer he was in the side for City the more assured he looked as well and the more he looked like he was wasted at right back. Most good right backs look like they are wasted in that position on the fringes of the action.
Hull City’s reserves are the fringes of the action for sure. They are nowhere for a player who had looked like he was going somewhere. City’s moves in the Premiership transfer market don’t suggest that a place will be opening up for Doyle soon. The guy needs to get back to first team football.
And City have a place for him but not at right back where Paul Arnison has been signed but back in the number four shirt and in the number four role. Doyle has the attributes needed to be Stuart McCall’s Stuart McCall.
He can win a ball and uses it smartly. He gets struck in but is not dirty. His instinct is to attack when defending is done and not leave his back door unlocked just like Stuart did. He has all the attributes needed to take games in League Two by the scruff of the neck and be the main man in a City team that aims for promotion. Throw in the fact that he is a popular player and he could be a summer headline signing for City.
And then he might do something that makes you see why he is player of the season.