BfB

The Lone Ranger sold his wardrobe / The Lone Ranger sold his bad dog
Harriet Wheeler, 1963 –

Should Graham Alexander’s Bradford City beat Fleetwood Town on the 3rd of May 2025 they will join a rarefied set in the club’s history. With forty-five games done in the campaign, City sit third, by a point, from a once Imperious Walsall side. It is tempting to say that the greatest challenge City face is themselves, and that League Two Manager of the Year Alexander recognises that.

A victory would be City’s seventeenth at home of the season, and more importantly bring promotion. Promotion, in this club’s history, is so rare as to indelibly mark. History makes caricatures of us all: the indefatigability of 2013, the creative elan of 1999, the stark contrast of 1985.

The characteristics of Alexander’s City are harder to tease out. A large squad of players who are on the whole at a similar level to each other. A goalscorer – Andy Cook – who has not featured since Christmas and perhaps could not. What are these characteristics, what are the characteristics of the division City are shaped in? And what do they say about Football today?

Times One

The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom.
William Blake – 1757 – 1827

Over the weekend as Bradford City were setting up their last day, Manchester City won an FA Cup Semi Final. We are assured by the long past tiresome Pep Guardiola that they will not confuse winning the oldest national football competition in the world with success.

Elsewhere, Liverpool demolished a Tottenham Hotspur team who rested eight players in preparation for their own semi-final, and in doing so won the Premier League by a double figures tally of points.

This is the football of abundance, and today it has a narrative to revel in as Anfield is able to celebrate a trophy. Guardiola’s grave tones are in contrast to Liverpool, who themselves had to watch Newcastle United at joy at winning the League Cup a month ago. Should Crystal Palace beat Guardiola’s Manchester City, then there is a chance that all three winners of the English season might feel a sense that they have excelled, rather than expected.

Mean

The ultimate hidden truth of the world is that it is something that we make, and could just as easily make differently.
David Graeber, 1961 – 2020.

In 2022 The World Inequality Lab noted that the top 1% alone held 23% of the wealth of the United Kingdom. The Joseph Roundtree Foundation talk of this altering the moral character of the country. Inequality brings about in people a sense that inequality is a natural entity, rather than a cultivated force.

This force of inequality creates an aimlessness in the character of the nation. Inequality is born from the structures and assumptions which govern our lives, which are themselves constructed, and could be constructed to be fairer. The inability to change one’s situation which inequality brings leads to a kind of diminishment of hope, which leads to joylessness.

In most years the Premier League offer a model for this aimless, joyless character where the likes of Manchester City are modelled as collecting titles as due returns on the large, iniquitous investments they made. More recently the Premier League installed Profit and Sustainability Regulations (PSR) to stem the hegemony of wealth, and it’s effect of removing competition.

GOAT

Sport doesn’t build character. Character is built pretty much by the time you’re six or seven. Sports reveals character.
Heywood Hale Broun 1918 – 2001

If the Premier League direction of travel continues, we could see the end of an era of Investment football, and that would be a good thing. Over the last two or three decades, football has become a grotesque, parodying the idea of competition. We have been told that the only good success is constant success. The best victory is the obvious victory, a victory never able to be seriously challenged.

It is the football world that anoints teenagers as the Next Greatest Player of All Time, then allows cognitive bias to address any inadequacies, or discards the teenagers when the realities of life catch up with them.

What is lost is the sense of competition being a crucible. That the purpose of football is to watch a continuing narrative in which a group of people are tested, and in failure forsaken, and in success challenged anew, and that both make a presentment about those involved.

That football is a continuing judgement. A crucible in which character is revealed, as it has been in League Two, over the last nine months.

Tier

I let my neighbor know beyond the hill; And on a day we meet to walk the line and set the wall between us once again.
Mending Wall, Robert Frost 1874 – 1963

Bradford City are obviously not the best team in League Two, or the second, or probably the third, or fourth. We could go on. In most games, there has been no reason at all to favour City over the opposition, or vice versa. Every week, one or two results make a nonsense of the League Table.

Make a tier list of League Two teams this season and one would be hard pushed to find a difference between Doncaster Rovers, Notts County, and almost any other team in the top half of the table. One might say that the league has had one A Tier Team: Walsall, one C Tier: Morecambe, and twenty-two in the B tier. And then Walsall jumped from A to C.

Every week, every game is a struggle of neighbours to who would claim the spoils. The Saturday afternoon encounter at Doncaster Rovers was no different. There is nothing to gift one side victory over another. There is hard work, and there is effort, and there is character, and there was its absence. All things, equal measures.

Saw

You are here, you’re right here, and you’re ready to fight
Tony Gilroy, 1956-

If football reveals the character of its players, then football supporting has something to say about character too. The lexicon which has overtaken football describes a vulgar absence of virtue. It is the language of entitlement, specifically an entitlement to have glory reflected onto you, and a preference for humiliating others. It is in keeping with the times.

By contrast in Bradford City – in many teams in League Two – we have a team which only wins when players are supporting one another, showing bravery in decision-making, in disciplined performances, in mental fortitude. League Two is a division of hardworking, and fighting for everything you can get.

And there is virtue to that. This is not critical of the excesses of The Premier League, or any league, just the inequities which have become so endemic that when a division emerges without clear favourites and a structured narrative of heavyweights and pushovers that it is hard to recognise what is in front of us.

It is hard to remember what we all say we want, but so seldom do we see, and recognise it. It is meritocracy. And it has been frustrating, and blissmaking, and upsetting, and joyous, and an absolute pleasure to watch.

Bad Writing

You can’t help it. An artist’s duty, as far as I’m concerned, is to reflect the times.
Nina Simone, 1933 – 2003

This is what I want this article to say, and I’m not sure if I have enough grasp of the English language to achieve what I want.

What surprises me the most about watching people watching Bradford City is how little stomach fans seem to have for the fight. This is a hard season because Bradford City are not a team which obviously should get promoted, we are a team which has to fight for every point, and after forty-five games that fight has left us with one win needed for promotion. Rather than enthralling, this seems to have irked a lot of people.

And I don’t understand why that is. I don’t understand why the mood of football – a mood far beyond Valley Parade, but including it – seems to have it that success is only good if it is obvious. That endeavour, that character, is unappealing when compared to an easy victory.

What would the guy who calls City and Graham Alexander “Bottlers” have City do? Pack up in the middle of April when the going got tough? What kind of victory is acceptable to them? A victory achieved without effort? Inherited through unearned privilege? Who are these people? What do they want?

It feels to me a reversal of something natural, and precious, and perhaps it is in keeping with the times, but I like that City are not entitled, are not winning because they have more money, are not able to be half-assed, or half-smart, and turn up, and succeed anyway. The people in the world who succeed like that, are bad people.

Times Two

Well, you saw him / And you can’t hardly know
Harriet Wheeler, 1961 –

To watch Bobby Pointon grow from Boy to Man, to watch Antoni Sarcevic push the demands of his body against his furious creativity, to watch Sam Walker flourish from beat down journeyman to leading player, to see Alex Patterson be the man that the player promised, to see Brad Halliday refuse the welcome embrace of the mediocre and fight against the twilight.

To see Clark Odour given the chance he should have grasped, or Brandon Khela not able to command a midfield, or the strange struggles of Tommy Leigh.

This is character revealed, and sometimes found wanting, and sometimes thriving. This is what football is about. Right here, right now. If this is not enough, then nothing is enough.

And if these are not the times, then nothing are the times.

Walking away from a comfortable victory for Bradford City against Grimsby Town in January 2025 there was a happy buzz of home fans having won, and away fans having seen a team perform well, and the feeling of a game well played.

A powerful run by Alex Pattison which led to an accurate finish had settled the contest, and deservedly so. Grimsby Town played well, Bradford City played better, but both teams would put off defining their seasons to a later date.

And my question is: whachcta?

Third

Two hours before City had lined up with a team without Andy Cook – a former Town player – but with Callum Kavanagh in his place and this seemed to be something which was taken in the stride.

Pausing for a moment, Cook is the third-best goalscorer in City’s history, his ten or so this season represents a very good return, and he is in good form, and the question that asks itself is why did this not matter?

One is tempted to say that it does not matter, because of the victory, but before kick off the talk of more movement and a more fluid front three was, if anything, more heard than after the final whistle.

Why is it that an objectively huge loss is seen as creating options rather than problems?

Three

To his credit, Graham Alexander has worked out something which most managers at Valley Parade have not. The narrowness of City’s pitch has always meant that away teams can take a kind of Motte and Bailey approach of defending strongly, and countering as the home team commit.

A solid defensive structure has always been easier with four players to cover 64 meters than the average of 68 with the occasional foray into the home side’s half leading to a familiar pattern of reversal. They sit deep, we go onto the attack, they counter and score. The reason City conversely seem to do well against better teams, is that better teams do this less.

Alexander has noted that the increased in player fitness and mobility over the course of his managerial career. What used to take a four-man line can be done with three only slightly less effectively. The extra man this frees can be used in more interesting positions elsewhere on the field.

Tres

Three along the back with two wingbacks in line with the back of a box midfield with a forward ahead of them is interesting, moving that box midfield to be a deep sitting pivot and two up front is an option too, and Alexander seemed able to run through those options.

David Artell – Grimsby’s equally minded manager – deployed counters around the midfield, but nothing that could come to grips with the fluidity City were showing. Both teams were obvious in their approaches. In some senses, this might have been the most technically excellent game of football ever played at Valley Parade.

But in some senses, it might have been a sham.

Hyperreal

This is a poor time to introduce Jean Baudrillard to any article, but Baudrillard – in his work – talked about how signs and signifiers are only really readable in context of each other, and this had led to a sense of hyperreality in which the representation of a thing stands in for the thing itself.

In a Baudrillardian sense, Bradford City and Grimsby Town might have simulated a football match. They cosplayed as Barcelona on a cold Winter day at Valley Parade and, because both teams, and the staff, and the fans were doing it, the simulation became real.

Which seems like an unfair comment to make after watching what was a highly enjoyable game of football, but one was left with a nagging sense that had Andy Cook been available, and his robust charms deployed, then the responses that Grimsby had would have been less prosaic and more practical, as would City’s approach, and so one wonders why those approaches were not used in the first place.

How much do wonderful, free flowing games of football in League Two depend on both managers tacitly agreeing to leave some approaches to one side? And if they do, if a game of football is played between people who agree to not use everything at their disposal, is it really a game of football or a simulation of it, and has that simulation taken on reality?

Fin

Given the game, and the win, it is hard to care.

There are three types of win in a football match, and City’s 0-0 toil with AFC Wimbledon was not any of them.

Not any because, most obviously, the game ended in a draw. Neither City – who under vague manager Graham Alexander, and to no effect, dropped last season’s top scoring Andy Cook for returning high goalscorer Jake Young – nor the visitors troubled the scoreboard.

Following the game, Alexander said he felt City should have won the game 1-0, which is a little like wishing that you won £1,000 on a million pound lottery.

One

The arm wrestle win, or positive win, is when two teams play a similar way and one is more effective than the other.  If you are of a certain vintage you’ll recall great football matches which could be described this way.

The 1986 FA Cup Final saw Liverpool beat Everton 3-1 and going through the two sides one could pass players between the two sides and there would be little difference.  The Merseyside Cup Final was two versions of the same team – more or less – playing in the same way – more or less – and the winner was the team which did better on that day.

This sort of win is about a team setting a goal, and being excellent at achieving it.  It is not about out thinking, or even out fighting, although both those things are important, so much as it is about having a greater efficiency.

Two

The trap card win, or negative win, is something which City have more of a relationship with, especially under Phil Parkinson, and it operates as an opposite to the arm wrestle.  In a trap card win, the strengths of the opposition is acknowledged but used against the opposition.

This is Bradford City vs Chelsea.  Chelsea’s strengths are turned to be weaknesses.  Their expectations to be better become source of frustration as City nullified what they could, and leading Chelsea to commit more, leaving City to counterattack against a team that feels like it is an affront to even have to defend.

This is one of football’s more glorious versions of a trap card win, but there are many, many others.  Saudi Arabia beat Lionel Messi’s Argentina on their way to the World Cup.  Most of the time the trap card win is about a worse team allowing a better one to tilt their resources into one area, while equalising battles in others.

Trap card wins are rarer in football because they start from an imbalance which is not often seen in league football but, when watching Manchester City trying to pass around Crystal Palace, or Norwich, in recent years one can observe this in action.

Three

In contrast to those two methods of victory, the scissors/paper/stone win describes a game in which one team deploys a way of playing which is fundamentally different to the opposition.  This way of playing football is increasingly the linga fraca of the game.

When people talk about Roberto De Zerbi’s Brighton, Henrik Rydström’s Malmo and Xavi Alonso’s Leverkusen they rarely talk about the players being better, but it does not matter, because it is not the quality of players which is important so much as what those players are doing.  Does it matter if you win your one to one battle with Leverkusen’s attacking midfielder when they back those players up with central defenders stepping past holding midfielders?  Did it matter that you nullified the 2008 Messi when the space you left was exploited by other players?

A scissors/paper/stone win is part of top level football, but not exclusively.  During the early 1990s John Beck of Cambridge United had his team hoof the ball seventy yards and progressed not by being better, but by being different.

Indeed

It was this kind of approach which animated City’s former manager Mark Hughes.  Whereas Phil Parkinson largely performed arm wrestle wins in league games, and the Welshman tried to win by being different.  His scissors/paper/stone was about maintaining possession and controlling the ball.  This worked, to a certain extent, but came unstuck in the play offs just as Parkinson’s attempts had against Millwall seasons before.

Neither approach is inherently better – although scissors/paper/stone is more interesting to discuss – and all three have their merits, with most teams attempting some combination, but rarely are successful teams not attracted to one of these pillars.

Which brings us to Graham Alexander, and Bradford City.

How

Alexander is new at the club, although given the expected life span of a City boss not that new, and has so far done little to suggest that he has a way of playing in mind.  His teams play wide, sometimes, but often not, and they mostly play three along the back, but originally they do not, and they play two up front, but sometimes they play one up front and so on.

As a pragmatist, Alexander is struggling to show the ability to recognise and retain pragmatic success.  Formations which start to work are changed for formations which might work.  Players who have found a place, are moved out of place, and it is all very without flavour.

Which is not to suggest that Alexander does not know how to be a success, or that he will not be, but that he will not be unless he can decide a way that he wants his team to try win games.

Are City going to out run, out fight, out battle?  Are City going to out think, out plan, and out smart?  Are City going to be and out and out better team that the rest of League Two?

All these things are possible, but the past three months of football have been beige, and the expectation that City will outperform their rivals but being so featureless seems to guarantee mediocrity.