BfB

Football matches are won and lost in the players heads. Not James Hanson’s external cranium and the way he batters it against pretty much every ball that comes his way but the insides of the noddle. The brain.

Notts County have won more than the odd game before kick off. They roll up to some backwater and have names that the other side have heard of in the team, “Oh look it is Lee Hughes”, and the hapless sort go onto the team to play County already beaten.

So it doesn’t matter if County have the best players in the league which they probably do because they could turn up with five guys with one leg wearing slippers and they would still win the match.

That is what happened to City on the first day of the season and what didn’t happen in this FA Cup first round exit. We had enough belief to have a battle and that battle was lost to a couple of goals in the minutes around half time but the fact that City ended the game with a shout of a match levelling penalty probably says a lot about how Bradford City have levelled a game with County in the Johnny Paint’s Cup and how we look at them not as the invincible just as a good team.

They are a good team but so are we. We are a more direct team than we have been for sometime and that causes problems for other sides. I think that when Omar Daley is back into the team instead of Scott Neilson who is a great player with a great future (but Omar is a match winner) then we will float up the league and settle somewhere around the third of fourth place.

We hear a lot about the effort that City put in. Graeme Lee wasn’t playing but he could learn a lot from Steve Williams and Zesh Rehman in terms of being at least as bothered about your teammate’s performance as your own. He could however teach that pair a thing or two about defending. City defend as a team but don’t defend brilliantly and are often found chasing a shadow rather than a man with the ball.

Lets not get too upset about this. Rather that than no chasing at all which is where we get back to County and the brain game they play. At the moment they seem scary and they have good players but Lee’s time at City would say that that is not enough and if they can keep the side playing to win and not slip into the mire that the Bantams ended last season in then they will have done well.

Not that I’d miss coming here or the supporters of County who sang without irony “2-0 in your cup final” in a cup competition, when the biggest crowd they will play against this season will probably be at out ground. I don’t know who the most intelligent fans in football are but it sure as Hell is not these people who get all angry because someone wants to know where the money for these players comes from.

In reverse order City should have had a penalty at the end when Michael Boulding was brought down but as Stuart McCall said the referee was behind play by fifty yards and could not give it because of that. Answers on a post card as to why that is not the same as Sir Fergs saying a Ref is unfit.

Simon Eastwood made some great saves but so did Russell Hoult and they had a half dozen players out showing the mental belief which they show in spades is deep running in the squad.

Boulding equalised at close range and City had a 45:55 share of the game. The two goals around half time knocked the Bantams out of the FA Cup at first time of asking but heads back be held high because we lost the game on the pitch, not in the dressing room, and even with the millions and billions of pounds we still have Wembley ’96.

That day City were romping through the division, Kammy’s side seeming fated to get promotion. They had belief. They won that game at Wembley walking out of the tunnel to see 40,000 of us an 10,000 of them. Won it before kick off really.

All in the head you see.