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.

There was a moment after Northampton Town’s Michael Jacobs hit a fine long range effort into the goal to give the visitors a second half lead that Phil Parkinson’s Bradford City seemed to make the collective decision that they deserved more from the afternoon than defeat, that they should summon up from a reserve of responsibility and courage and force the performance to swing in their favour. In the parlance of our times: City manned up.

Ten minutes later the Bantams had won the game.

Watching football with a scouting report in one hand is a strange afternoon. Northampton’s side lined up not at all as they had in the game which our report detailed and many of the problems which the City scouting report suggested a few weeks ago had been plugged by Gary Johnson’s side who were missing striker Adebayo Akinfenwa and seemed to have adjusted accordingly. The result was a robust Cobblers side who deployed a man – Ben Tozer – holding between City’s midfield pair and as a result broke up much of the Bantams play but that was all that the visitors did with the Bantams backline utterly shutting out the visitors.

A surprisingly recalled Michael Bryan carved out the best chance – only one of two which stood out the other being a long range effort by Robbie Threlfall – taking the ball in field and twisting the loft a shot onto the bar. City gave nothing away and edged the first half but it was difficult to see where the goals would be coming from.

Where Northampton would be getting goals from was less of a mystery with the report warning of Jacobs and his abilities to strike the ball. His opportunity came when Adam Reed – booked for a bad tackle, but later subject of a similar one which got no punishment – was left floored and as he struggled to get back to position Jacobs fired in.

At that point Reed and Richie Jones – the midfield partnership in the absence of suspended Michael Flynn – seemed to have struggled to get around the Cobblers midfield nor could they make partnerships with the wide men but both seemed to sense the need to make a performance and Jones stepped to the fore.

It had been suggested that the midfielder was wasted on the right flank last week and one might have thought that thinking wishful until Jones took control of the middle of the field coming forward with direction and drive, tracking back to create solidity when needed, and leading by example.

It was Jones who drove forward with the ball feeding it left to Bryan and eventually resulting in a cross which defender Andy Holt tried to cut out but only succeeded in handling. Craig Fagan beat keeper Sam Walker from the spot.

Five minutes later and Jones came forward again battling in to push the ball wide to Kyel Reid for the winger – who had usual game veering between utter frustration and sublime moments – to drop a ball to James Hanson who beat his man and converted from inside the six yard box.

It was a worthy turnaround and one which Jones had much to do with. The midfielder might spend his career being the guy who plays the ball to the guy who gets the assist and very few stats record that contribution, but I’m sure the scout report would have noted it, or will do in the future.

Having been beaten by a long range shot only City never looked like surrendering the lead. Luke Oliver’s performance was remarkable for the fact that we are growing to expect that sort of display from a player that many, many would have written off at the end of last season while Marcel Seip’s Valley Parade debut saw him looking assured, mobile and confident. No one said the words “Guy Branston” all afternoon and as City start to rise up the league so the goal difference starts to look more respectable.

Moreover though City’s victory was – as with the win over Torquay – hard fought. While the attractive football of Stuart McCall’s side might have gone so has the soft centre. City are less easy on the eye, but Saturday nights after a win are satisfying.

Sitting back on such a Saturday night and flicking over the scout report the danger of Michael Jacobs is written in black and white but so is that of Lewis Young – the right winger wearing number two who was frustrated all afternoon – who the Bantams coped with superbly. The talk about the goalkeeper Walker and his control of his box were accurate and City seemed to fire low hard crosses rather than allow the six foot seven custodian grab balls from the air.

One wonders though what the scouts who watched City will have written about the Bantams today. One thing is for sure those reports will have had the word “character” in them, and that is what took Phil Parkinson’s side to victory today.