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It ended on a narrow pitch, a string of strikers marked out as a line across the pitch. Thursday evening, Valley Parade, Bolton players wheeling away in celebration away having surged towards City’s goal in a breathless counter-attack. The visitors had been pinned back by Bradford City’s possession but once they added to their first leg lead it left an awkward fifteen minutes of football to grind out.

Trailing from the first leg City applied pressure first for the opening forty-five minutes in the second leg to Bolton, and then started to have chances, and then hit the bar, and then there was a not-a-goal and then there was an actual goal, and that was that.

City left the field to a standing ovation, deserved too, this fourth placed finish is the best that the Bantams have followed promotion with in the club’s history, and the players left everything on the field against Bolton.

Ended

Having pushed Bolton’s highly effective wide players Amario Cozier-Duberry and Ibrahim Cissoko back with Josh Neufville and Ibou Touray camping out in the visitor’s half City could not have wished for a better situation from which to mount the attempt to overturn a single goal deficit. That situation was eroded though as Kayden Jackson, leading the forward line, struggled to find a way to be effective and the returning Bobby Pointon and Antoni Sarcevic were well policed by Bolton pair Josh Sheehan and Ethan Erhahon squeezing the defensive midfield line on top of the back four, denying space for City’s creators.

Bradford City manager Graham Alexander broke out of those restraints with a second half change which brought on Stephen Humphrys and Nick Powell. City have a reliance on balls played long behind the opposition full backs and committed to a half hour of pursuing long passes into channels behind the wide defensive line.

So the change saw Humphrys and the now wide Jackson combining with Tyreik Wright and Neufville, but lacking a sense of a pattern or a route to goal. Max Power tested the keeper with a long range effort, Powell headed towards goal, and Jackson had an effort ruled out, but none of these seemed to come from structured play so much as a determination to not allow the game to end goalless.

Another forward, Will Swan, came on to join the line and so the game ended with three of the five options that Alexander had tried in the forward role of attack all strung out across the width of Valley Parade. Bradford City – to a man – have been remarkable to watch this year, but this was as clear an indication as one could want that something had misfired in the final third.

Timelines

Football exists on timelines which seem to resonate forever while fading from memory. Wandering down Lumb Lane back to the car following the play-off defeat, the memory of First Day Humphrys returned to mind. The 2-1 victory over Wycombe Wanderers that welcomed City to League One saw The Bantams Number Eleven described aptly as unplayable.

The new recruit from Barnsley seemed to appear at will across the forward line ripping the visitor’s defence to shreds with his movement, and the consensus was that all that was missing from that performance was some well deserved goals for Humphrys. City started the season impressively and few were more impressive than First Day Humphrys.

No player defines City’s season more than him. First Day Humphrys was terrifyingly good, and continued to be, as the Bantams took up a place in the higher positions of League One which we would never leave.

Watch those August and September games again and the ball comes out of Power or Neufville to First Day Humphrys, who takes it on his chest and pushes it back to Sarcevic who then lifts the ball to Bobby Pointon and City compress fifty yards of pitch in one third man pass. It is some of the best football played at Valley Parade, bar none.

Or the ball is hit behind the right back and First Day Humphrys takes possession while Pointon heads for the penalty spot with Sarcevic coming past him on the diagonal. Defenders are left chasing vapours. This was a Bradford City team with patterns of attack worked out and players who could improvise around them.

It worked, like th improvisation in Jazz works, and then it it did not.

Adapt

It was Bolton, seemingly cast as City’s nemesis this season, who could have been the first team to take the Bantams seriously this year as they did in the away tie at the end of 2025, although Lincoln City might claim to have done similar in the draw at Valley Parade. This scrappy promoted team needed to be stopped, and breaking up these attacking triangles between the front three was the way to do that.

With that signal sent out to the league, the Bradford City games became attritional. Out thinking and out playing the opposition – as City had done gloriously at Cardiff City in a 3-1 win – was replaced by out fighting and a steely determination to not allow the early season promise to fade. This might be the most admirable thing about 2025/26 for Bradford City, and the team which Graham Alexander built, and wins like the Port Vale victory over Christmas were vivid examples of that.

Many, many teams in a football season fail to adapt, fail to commit, fail to revive themselves after defeats in the way that City have in 2025/26. Calm, diligent, wins over the likes of Port Vale in the Winter brought Bradford City to the play-offs as much as steamrollering Cardiff in the Autumn did.

That shift from lucky League Two side to a serious League One contender had casualties in the squad. Tommy Leigh moved from mainstay to exile, Andy Cook out, Brad Halliday out. The fact that Paul Mullin and Joel White played for Bradford City this season is something history will probably forget.

Tough

Winter was tough, and the recruitment and outgoings that Bradford City made in the transfer window were a puzzle. Cook’s exit chafed largely because the arriving Mullin and Manchester United loanee Ethan Wheatley failed to have a sustained impact on City’s forward line. Kayden Jackson’s pressing and lithe finishing suggests him as the biggest success of those signings, but that seems to be damning with feint praise.

The characteristics of most of the Winter recruitment were that City could not get the players they wanted, and so got the players who would not commit the club to longer contracts, which is an obviously good idea but left the forward line reaching again for the fluidity which marked the early season. With defences aware of what City would try to do the need to improvise seemed to be in inverse proportion to the ability of the new members of the squad to do that.

Wheatley is especially guilty of this being an able player, who largely performed within the confines of the role as it was set out and did so without the variation which would have made him difficult to play against. One could never say Ethan Wheatley did not put in the effort for Bradford City, but one struggles to remember a moment where he did anything atypical.

Which is not to suggest that City need to aim for atypicality, but the ability to move between positions with a sense of improvisation made City difficult to play against in the first half of the season, while the ability to grind past a defence marked the second, and the former was more effective than the latter.

Considering Powell, Mullin, Cook, Jackson, Wheatley and Humphrys over the last five months one is forced to conclude that no player has come anywhere close to the danger poised by First Day Humphrys.

Vibes

What happened to First Day Humphrys?

Around me, I hear people suggesting Humphrys is lazy – I don’t think he is – or that he should jump in the air more – I think that is a bit silly – but were I to give these and other ideas about Humphrys credence then they would point to a broader question as to how a player went from such great heights to being a peripheral figure on the left wing against Bolton.

Humphrys seems like an interesting man – attesting in interviews to being bored by playing up front, in favour of the sweeping orthodoxy of Reform UK which I loathe – he is every inch the modern player. Social media has opened his life to supporters, and tactical analysis has pushed him into a position based on statistical certainties rather than indications and ideas about where his best position might be.

It is an eternal debate in football over who is responsible for the performance of players. Managers are – in some way – there to get the best out of the footballers in their charge while players have an obligation to be their best selves at all times. This is an axis which shifts on the popularity of the personalities involved, but at some point First Day Humphrys went away, and Peripheral Humphrys arrived and that was bad for the club.

Is there a virtue to assigning responsibility for that? Are there lessons to be drawn from it? Almost certainly, but those are impossible to understand from outside the training ground, the conversations between player and manager, and it feels unfair to assign blame despite the ubiquity of doing that.

Deft

As the season progressed Graham Alexander found a way to maintain the City forward line which was much to do with playing the ball long and diagonal behind the opposition full backs and pushing Jenson Metcalfe into a significant creative role. Metcalfe’s emergence has been a highlight of the season, and watching him deftly move from unreliable prospect to central figure in the side has been edifying.

Metcalfe and Power spent much of the season trying to make their two men seem like three when getting out numbered in midfield, and they did that admirably, if sometimes ineffectively away from home. City missed the fluidity of the opening months of the season, and away defeats became as common in the Winter as home defeats were rare, but it was the craft of the midfield two which sustained the team through the season.

Max Power seem assured to be City’s captain next season while Metcalfe – should City not be beset by suitors for him – is a player to build a promotion challenge around. Alexander needs more quality in reserve – Lee Evans stood in manfully this year when called upon – but may consider bolstering that part of the field with an extra player.

Alexander has played three players centrally in previous teams, and been successful with those approaches.

Likewise, Ibou Touray and Josh Neufville emerge from the season with an impressive performance and a rising reputation respectively. Tyreik Wright provided an interesting option on the left to add a second, more attacking, wing back on that side of the field but Harrison Ashby – arriving on loan from Newcastle during the season – failed to live up to the standard set by Brad Halliday who departed in the Winter for a longer contract in Scotland.

As with Metcalfe, Neufville is attracting attention and City’s resolve may be tested in keeping him. His adaptability makes him especially useful and his improvement as a defensive wing back has been obvious this season. Much of the second half of the season depended on passes from Power to Neufville which the ill-equipped winger had to win in the air, a task he took to, but this feels like a less than optimal way of using a player who was so devastating running onto passes in the opening months.

There it sits

Spring came with the Bantams fighting out a play-off for promotion, and that was because of performance of the back three and Sam Walker in goal. With Alexander having defended the narrow of Valley Parade with three players that unit – which changed in personnel but never quality – was paramount.

Josh Wright, Matthew Pennington, and Curtis Tilt, and when called upon Touray, were all impressive all season, but probably Aden Baldwin was the tallest poppy of the group. Returning to hearts following his sending off at Doncaster Rovers at the end of last season Baldwin rebuilt his reputation. His passing range was relied on in the later season and while his season ended in an ignominy of taking the blame for Bolton’s goal in the play-offs, the fact that when Alexander had replaced every other centre back on the field, Baldwin remained, spoke volumes about his performance.

I’m often told that City fans want effort over everything, and will forgive anything if application is high. There it sits. I am almost certain there is a name which Alexander would like to add to that back three which raise the level of the defensive line, but I’m almost certain that all the central defenders who played significant roles this could do the same next.

On Sam Walker I recall reading that no League One club would swap their keeper for him at the start of the season, but I’m fairly sure at the end many would have liked City’s limited concessions. There are obviously better keepers in the division, but if Sam Walker is City’s keeper next season he will carry on doing a solid job, and there is a virtue in his reliabilities.

Resisted

Those reliabilities at the back were underlined against Bolton Wanderers in the play-offs. There was little to choose between the two teams, but that little was the difference. City pressed, Bolton resisted, and it feels not unfair to suggest that if City were 100% then Bolton were 101%, and that the defeat came not from the single moment of Amario Cozier-Duberry in the first leg, but the thousand cuts of battles contested.

Bolton go to Wembley with good wishes, they played well in a tight tie, and of the four teams in the play-offs are probably the best equipped for the Championship. The Trotters will hope though they can find another Cozier-Duberry, or another Ibrahim Cissoko, both of whom are on loan and seem pivotal to Bolton’s success and any success they might have next season.

Which returns us to the subject of forward lines and City’s misshapen set against Bolton on the final Thursday night. Half the players who had been tried at solutions to City’s attacking fluidity: Humphrys, Swan and Jackson; all played behind Nick Powell trying to affirm quantity as a quality.

Event Horizon

The forward line of two men supporting a mobile striker has served Graham Alexander well over the last eighteen months. It was the solution to losing Andy Cook to injury against Barrow in the Winter of 2025 and has moved City from the middle of League Two to the top of League One. The manager’s ability to evolve that system to return to the fluency which used to characterise it will do much to define 2026/27.

Most obviously the system City play works well for Bobby Pointon who – trotting off before the end on his return from injury against Bolton – has admirers and may move on while Antoni Sarcevic also enjoys the withdrawn role. Sarcevic can probably pick his moment to exit City and should he pick this Summer and look for promotion number ten elsewhere then Alexander is given the chance to remake how his team goes attacks.

City are at an event horizon with Stephen Humphrys where he either returns to the position and form of First Day Humphrys, or both parties cut their losses. Kayden Jackson has his moments leading a line alone, but his presence in the penalty area is a shadow of First Day Humphrys.

Previous Alexander teams have had three midfielders with a pair of forwards, and while this would not fit Humphrys, Sarcevic and Pointon, should they exit then that sort of attack is a possibility. Likewise over the summer there is an opportunity to look at configuring City around two deep sitting midfielders of Power and another, Metcalfe in a single attacking midfield role and two forwards ahead of him to give more presence in the final third.

Watching City dominate the ball, but not ball position, during the Bolton visit in keeping with other games at the end of the season suggest that City’s approach to next season needs addressing. The ball is bad if it is not in the good position, and Bolton were content to allow City to keep the ball while it was away from dangerous areas.

Irony

History has a sense of irony, and this version of Bradford City wrote some history with the best finish following promotion the club has ever had. It had looked like City’s Achilles Heel would be that on wider pitches the defence struggled to contain opposition attacks.

However, the season ended not with the defensive three pulled apart on the wide spaces of Wembley but with a tight defensive line looking forward at the attack which was marked by in fluidity in August but toiled to not enough effect, every member of it trying to remember what made it work, on a May evening at Valley Parade.

It was as far from the 2-1 victory over Wycombe Wanderers on the first day of the season as it could have been, and it was a Stephen Humphrys season, and perhaps that will be the thought that animates Graham Alexander all summer.