BfB

It has become an open secret that Peter Jackson will be the full time Bradford City manager as long as he does not mess up the next three games.

Open secret might be overstating things, it is a rumour might underplay them though, but one by one everyone you talk to about the City job starts saying the same thing. Jackson has three games to win the job. How many of them he needs to win you can only guess at. Today at Gillingham, Rotherham on Tuesday and Morecambe on Saturday and four points are probably not going to be enough so two wins might be the ticket, unless the board fancy appointing the guy who is doing “ok.”

Three wins to claim the job or three to save it if you prefer and if he does not do enough in the next seven days then John Hughes is the man. It’s like Jackson has arrived under pressure, fighting for his job, and in a way City have managed to find a way of limping from one manager needing wins to another.

So two wins in the next three and Jackson is to be anointed having proved to be too good to not give the job to – or so it will be spun no doubt – but Hughes is a back up in case the season slips again into relegation problems.

Jackson starts the fight well with City going at the home team who will accept nothing less than promotion with Luke Oliver spurning a chance with minutes gone to head in a deep corner. A couple of minutes later both Gareth Evans and Kevin Ellison could have done better.

Evans and Ellison are deployed as widemen in a 4-4-2 with Michael Flynn in the middle and Jon Worthington behind him. Worthington doesn’t last the first half going off bleeding and he is missed quickly when Gillingham’s massive strike Adebayo Akinfenwa scores after a sucession or cheap few kicks.

Cheap free kicks from a referee who at one point books one of the City subs so much does he struggle to keep the players on the rich in control that his bookings leak out to people who aren’t playing. A guy in Argentina sent off 36 players in one game this week, it could be worse.

Jackson’s laying out in the 4-4-2 Peter Taylor would not play, Stuart McCall loved and football managers risk being called old fashioned for using. The shape suits the players more and the look more assured and comfortable and as a result it is all more enjoyable.

Jackson – or Hughes – might wish he had Omar Daley back for the orthodox 4-4-2 which plays little man big man with Jake Speight and Jim Hanson and the kind if midfield pair that seems to work. Worthington knows Jackson from Huddersfield and is instantly back in the side. No one says the F word.

As a supporter who sees mostly Southern games, and away games, the performance was better than we have seen for sometime and some of that is new manager excitement but most is the way the players fit into the formation.

They look more at ease but when at the start of the second half Curtis Weston powers down the wing and smashes the ball into the too corner suddenly that ease starts to worry. The two widemen not know for their crossing, the little man up front who flatter to deceive, and Jackson faces the question as to if his team have the goals in them.

Flynn tries to respond quickly raising the tempo and Speight gets a chance after good work from Evans but the game seems out of reach from the moment of the second goal.

So for Jackson there is optimism from a good performance but the realities of football management for his predecessors have it that only winning is important and technical merit, and being the hero of fans, does not get you far at Valley Parade.

Hanson spends the afternoon winning everything but Speight does not read his flicks well enough and the two widemen are not able to join the attack with pace. It looks good but is not effective.

Luke O’Brien heads the ball off the line, making up for getting stormed past by Weston earlier, to give Jackson’s hopes of claiming this defeat as a creditable enterprise. City were always going to struggle at a promotion chaser and the result is no worse than can be expected, Tuesday night probably represents a better gauge.

Certainly the players will have plenty of time to think about it on the coach on the way home. It is about a five hour drive back to Bradford, Peter Jackson has three hours of football left to make a claim to be City boss.

M.O.D. Aldershot and this is my closest game so I’ve brought some of the lads and in the first minute I wish I had not. I’m not a football expert but I know that teams have got to play better than this if they are going to win matches and watching the last two games for the Bantams (The other one being the 2-1 defeat at Oxford) I can’t believe what I’m seeing. It is like a City team that don’t want to do anything.

They don’t want to pass the ball, they don’t want to take shots at goal. They don’t want to tackle, they don’t want to get in the way of the ball. They don’t seem to fancy the job of being professional footballers that much. You could pick out the odd good move and nice ball or something but what is the point of that? Tom Ademeyi missed a good chance early on and you knew that there was nothing coming after that. Dave Syers looks good, James Hanson looks good, some player look good but that is not really the point. Jon McLaughlin was back in for Lenny Pidgeley but when was the last time a team turned its fortunes around by changing goaly?

Maybe it is what we do down here but for me football matches are all about the unit, the team, and good and bad doesn’t even really come into it when talking about the players because when the unit fails the individuals fail. End of story.

Likewise a unit makes a solider (or a footballer) better. Leon Osbourne came on after twenty minutes for Lee Bullock and looks like a matchstick man wandering around a field but it is the unit’s fault that they do not cope with the change, and it is the unit’s fault that they do not support the weaker players and pull their level of performance up.

Stuart McCall used to do that as a player. McCall would not let one of his team mates have a bad game, and if he was, Macca would be geeing him up and pulling him through. A real leader which is what that City team lacks, but not that only thing.

With a new manager in Dean Holdsworth Aldershot had a little bit of a buzz about them but they did not lay siege to City’s goal or send waves of attacks at us they just seemed to win the game by default. They turned up, and won, and we did not turn up. Victory was not even difficult for them. Ben Harding looked impressive for them but no more impressive than the odd City player did. The point I’m trying to make is that they were allowed to coast to victory.

Trying to remember the better moments and there is hardly anything to talk of. Robbie Threlfall has a free kick, maybe, but mostly it was City defending and the only goal of the game by Anthony Charles never looked like being clawed back. The players did not want it enough, because they didn’t want to work together. I don’t know what goes on in the dressing room at City but I can’t imagine it is a very happy place because the players have no collective work ethic at all. Osbourne or Daley lose the ball and the rest of the players seem to look at them rather than trying to win it back.

It is eleven footballers and not one unit, and that is the fault of the man in charge, and requires a change in that man in charge regardless of where they train or whatever. A leader’s job, and Peter Taylor is the leader of the unit, is to create a dynamic in which the whole is more than the sum of the parts and in the year he has been in charge I have never seen City play like that.

A view is taken on if the situation will improve without a change, I don’t think it will, and so a change needs to be made either now or in the Summer when Peter Taylor’s contract is up. Mark Lawn will do whatever makes him most popular and so I’d be expecting a change sooner rather than later.

So another very depressing evening watching City. Everyone has their own thing they want from the team. Some people want great players and some want blood and guts. Me, I want to see a team that play as a team and in the last year Taylor’s not been able to do that and as the players wandered off heads down not one of them within five foot of a team mate it showed. There was some footballers on the pitch, but no team.

It was not so much Aldershot 1 City 0 as Aldershot 1 Jon McLaughlin 0 Richard Eckersley 0 Shane Duff 0 Luke Oliver 0 Robbie Threlfall 0 Omar Daley0 Tom Adeyemi 0 Lee Bullock 0 David Syers 0 Luke O’Brien 0 James Hanson 0 Leon Osbourne 0 Gareth Evans 0 Mark Cullen 0.

And Peter Taylor 0.

Sometimes, perhaps most of the time, success in football is comes from errors, cock-ups and mistakes.

The best laid plans go wrong and what one is left with, just sort of works. There was no plan in place that after replacing Lennie Lawrence Chris Kamara would spend three months doing nothing and then suddenly go Hell for Leather for promotion, there was no plan that Paul Jewell would end up replacing him and turn out to be brilliant.

Happy accidents then, capitalised on. Normally though it is mistakes by other people which offer the best chance for progress and just as seats were taken at Lincoln City for the first game of 2011 James Hanson was take one of those opportunities. A bad back pass, Hanson on the ball, slips past the keeper and suddenly nothing seemed as bad as it had before.

It was Moses Swaibu who made the mistake. Not his first. It is said he stole a chicken from Asda over the Christmas holiday. “Voting for Christmas” maybe.

Peter Taylor’s team were without Lee Hendrie who had left the club without much fanfare along with Louis Moult who seemed to spend his time at City waiting for someone to make enough mistakes to give him a chance but failing to capitalise on those chances when they arrived. A reduced squad will perhaps give the impression that Peter Taylor has settled on his best team but the surprise return of Robbie Threlfall suggests that the manager still grabs numbers out of a bag to find his team.

Sometimes though his team seems to work. Lee Bullock returned for Tommy Doherty today and gave more of a bite in the midfield and when Gareth Evans was penalised for a handball and Ashley Grimes scored it certainly wasn’t part of the run of play, and it might not have been a penalty either. Evans himself was booked for a dive in the second half but only after he had scored the game’s winning goal barrelling forward and slamming in a great strike to the top corner just before half time.

The win was deserved although had Lincoln had a better striker than Delroy Facey then City might have surrendered the lead. The home side got desperate and Mustapha Carayol was lucky to stay on for a nasty foul on Luke O’Brien.

Brightening City’s afternoon though was the return of Steve Williams who looked insanely good and Shane Duff who played well. Williams came to City when the budget was cut following the failure to win promotion. The chance to bring in Hanson and Williams, match winners today, was capitalising on the mistake. If Peter Taylor can carry on capitalising then the season might not be over yet.

What is an FA Cup shock? Last night FC United of Manchester beat Rochdale and the result was hardly unpredictable. In fact as the masses of disenchanted Mancunians descended on Spotland it seemed to me that it would be more of a surprise if the league club had won.

That is the problem with the FA Cup. Some clubs want it, others don’t, and when you turn up at a game you do not know which of those two your club will be in. If one side does not care as much about the game as they do the league on Saturday then even if you win, you don’t get a good game.

So it was more geography that meant I trotted up to Colchester to watch City and probably the fact that not many City fans were coming down to the game that means I ended up doing this match report. I was fully prepared for seeing a second string from one side or the other and not much of a game. As it was City went into the game with pretty much a full strength side, Omar Daley was out and Louis Moult in, and Colchester seemed to have done similar and the result was a bit of a humdinger of a game.

Colchester took an early lead, City equalised, that happened again and at half time you would have done well to pick who the higher league team were and certainly who the better one was. City seemed a soft touch at the back but in James Hanson have a striker who seems to be on his way to better things. Steve Williams did not finish the game limping off with a quarter of an hour left so any watching scouts from the East Midlands will have gone home early but it is to be hoped that Sven does not see Hanson who scored twice and put in a great troublesome performance.

Moult set up Hanson’s first goal with a nice pass between defenders as the first equaliser and Luke O’Brien set up Hanson’s second and City’s third with a corner. O’Brien also set up David Syers’ goal with a cross too. O’Brien has come on so much under Peter Taylor and like Hanson, Williams and Syers looks like players who will play at a higher level.

Two second half goals from Colchester United tipped the game their way with the second second half goal was a penalty which seemed to leave Peter Taylor fuming and in the end was the difference between the two teams. Luke Oliver seemed to challenge him fairly enough but any challenge in the box is dangerous in modern football. Oliver and Zesh Rehman are so far behind O’Brien and Williams and it shows when City defend.

Modern football does not seem to have much room for the FA Cup any more though. The game was exciting enough but at the end of the day (and after giving it a good go) City were out and Colchester through but it hardly seemed to matter to people. The excitement was not there and the game felt a little but too much like a pre-season friendly than what used to be one of the most exciting games of the year.

Perhaps it is cause City have been to the top and back that trips to Colchester do not inspire but then again Colchester’s fans wandered away from the game without much of a spring in the step. Maybe it is rose tinted glasses but we always used to get more excited by the FA Cup.

No complaints from the players today though

As it was this was an exciting game of football, both teams went for it, and it was not about cup shocks or giant killing or people who or have a day job scoring against professionals all those boring ITV cliches. It was just a proper game of football, and that was a bit of a cup shock for me.

The thing about seeing City twice a year is that you spend the rest of the time trying to guess what the team are like.

You read match reports and watch highlights and your head makes up the rest of the game. You try to guess why the team does well or badly. You add the bits you read to the bits you see and you try see what makes the team good or bad from a long way away.

You get to see the odd game. Torquay is not that far from where we live and so you turn up all happy because you are getting to see the team you used to support week in week out but now you only see a couple of times and when you do you make sure you know all the names of the players and what people think of them, how they look on the Football League Show but seeing them play is different.

Wearing all white they look different to the claret team that kept me up watching Sky Sports News to see the winner against Forest or the one who had struggled to a win last week. I was expecting that kind of dour grinding out of a result. It didn’t take long to change.

I would have thought before today that John McLaughlin was a much more confident keeper than he looked when he stood stock still when tiny Gills winger Danny Stevens ran from the middle of the pitch and put the ball past him but he isn’t. He looked raw and not really the player who had demanded a chance for first team football like you’d believe from reading the talk about City.

Lots of supporting City from down here is about reading. You read the club’s website and you read the Telegraph and Argus. You read Fred Bloggs Bantams, BfB and Bantams Fan. You read Claret and Banter and The Official Message Board and you join in but you know you are cut off from it all because when you watch Zesh Rehman who you are led to believe is the worst sort of rubbish you think you must be watching a different player and when you see the so called bearded wonder Tommy Doherty you can’t see what people see in him at all.

I wanted to see Jake Speight today to see if you could see the horns and tail and I wanted to see more of Luke O’Brien because I liked his hustle last year. Louis Moult was supposed to be the great white hope. He hardly got noticed.

Rehman came on cause Robbie Threlfall was sent off after ten minutes for a handball that was caused by a lot of confusion and seemed a bit harsh but when you only see City a couple of times a year and they have already gone a goal down and conceded a penalty and had a red card then you think that everything is unfair. McLaughlin saved the penalty and then made a couple of other great stops. It is funny to see a footballer like McLaughlin who’s confidence lags behind his ability. Normally it is the other way around.

McLaughlin could have been at fault for the second goal when Chris Zebroski seemed to back the ball into the net but it was hard to tell in the melee. It seemed that the City keeper needed a drink of what they people who watch City drink. They assume that the Bantams are great and just need to play that way, McLaughlin can play great but doesn’t seem to know it.

City never looked like winning the game after the sending off although last year’s hero Gareth Evans looked good and James Hanson was good having two headers which could have been the first the home team conceded in the last fifty years or something. Three wins out of three for them so far. Taylor went to a wing backs formation taking off the disappointing beardeo and the fact that we were in the game as long as we were was something but I was glad for once to not have to be driving all the back to Bradford cause there was not very much to cheer you up.

Its funny but some of the City fans don’t want cheering up or the only way they do want cheering up is by Mark Lawn and Julian Rhodes taking what they call drastic action. Over a drink before there was talk about Steve Cotterill and how he should have been appointed rather than Peter Taylor and how much of a difference that would have made. After there were more grumbles but no one really knows what drastic action is including me.

At the game some people got aggressive and there were boos and jeers. This always upsets me cause when I left Bradford I thought that the thing about only going to away games from then on would be that you only got the great support that we had at Tranmere 5-4. Not like that now.

The joint chairmen are in a funny position now. They gave the fans who wanted a change of manager a change of manager when Taylor was appointed so how can they justify not doing it again? Lawn and Rhodes gave the decision making at City over the the people who moaned the most and if those people are moaning again why not do as they say? Apart from the fact that we are three games into the season and have got what almost everyone agrees good manager. You have to wonder how long it is before stories about how nice the suits City wear are not enough to stop the fans from looking at the City board after changing manager time and time again but never changing fortunes.

So I’ll go back to reading (and writing) and wonder what state the Bantams will be in the next time I see them. We used to say it couldn’t be much worse but it always can and even when down and struggling today it never seemed that Taylor could do much other than make sure his players kept their heads and hung in the game. Last year Evans got us a bit of luck in the last minute and today we were in with a chance of that for a long time. It wasn’t to be and it looked unlikely for most of the match.

On Tuesday perhaps Speight will be in the team to play Preston North End and I’ll be back to following City from afar. Funny it is easier to see what is going wrong from miles away or at least it seems to be.