BfB

Some friends and I went to the football to watch Bradford City chew on the gristle that was Ian Holloway’s Swindon Town.

Thirteen was confused. He really liked what he saw from Swindon and at the end of the game he was really impressed with how hard they worked. “They ran harder, and they made things hard, and that is going to get them more wins than not this season.” Twenty-Four pointed out they were third bottom.

Oh-Three was not really taking part in the conversation. He was just looking wide-eyed at the game with the kind of thousand yard stare that of a man who had seen something he did not especially want to. After a time he started to speak and when he did speak he mumbled that that was probably the highest quality football match he had ever seen, before dismissing the idea as fanciful and going quiet.

Angela

Physicist Angela Collier, when talking about Crackpots, likens receiving their emails to being a hardworking chef who is confronted by someone who storms into the kitchen, claims that they should be head Chef, and would be if not for the Establishment stopping them, before slamming a pizza box down with what they are saying is the greatest, most important meal ever in it.

Open the box, and it is not even food, it is Play-doh. Play-doh shaped like food, superficially perhaps resembling food, and you laugh, because it is laughable. It is all laughable, until Eileen Fahey.

How much onus is there people who study Physics to explain Physics to people who have not studied Physics? Is that even possible?

Disagree

My friends and I went to watch the Bradford City vs Barrow game on a Tuesday night too. Thirteen found the game lacked intensity, while Oh-Two felt it was almost entirely pointless. Ninety-One marvelled, in a way at the way that the players lined up, drifting around the pitch seemingly untethered.

When Bobby Pointon crossed to Andy Cook to head home City’s equaliser late in the game we all stood and cheered long and loud – we all have that much in common – and Thirteen was pretty forceful in saying how he felt that City should have done more of that and less of the passing play which had marked out some of the exchanges. “Get the ball, in the box.”

Twenty-Four turned to him askance, annoyed at the comma, but annoyed at more too. “One time, in the whole game, did we get the guy who crossed the ball in the place to cross the ball when the guy who heads the ball was in the place to head the ball.”

Hunting

Will turns around reveling that he’s lit the PROOF ON FIRE. Will drops it on the floor. Lambeau drops to his knees and puts it out. He looks up at Will.

LAMBEAU:
You’re right, Will. I can’t do that proof and you can. And when it comes to this there are only twenty people in the world that can tell the difference between you and me. But I’m one of them.

WILL
Well, I’m sorry.

LAMBEAU:
So am I.

Control

There is an oft repeated but rarely explained word in football, and that word is control, as in “We controlled the game”, “We controlled the midfield”. It is obfuscated largely because as a term it has a cluster of meanings rather than a single one but aggregating that cluster one is given to understand this.

Control in football is about having both or either the ball and the players on the field where you want them to be when you want them. On a base level, control could be about having more position – that is what Tiki Taka is about – but it could also be about attacking more down one side than another, or forcing one player to give up possession quicker than others.

In more detail, control is about moving through the phases of play at the opportune moments. The best time to move from Situation A to Situation B is when Situation B is ready to be moved to. The best time to pass a ball is when the player you want to receive it is in the position you want them to be, and the action which you want to follow that has the most chance of success.

End

The best chance to get the ball to Bobby Pointon is when he is in the far left side of the penalty area and Andy Cook is around the penalty spot – as City showed against Barrow – and control is the term used to describe how one achieves that.

That sort of control is rarely, if ever, gained by lashing the ball down the field, or playing it quickly forward, or having wide midfielders hitting the ball mirthlessly into the area every time they get past a full back.

It is achieved by retaining position and moving the opposition around until a time when Situation A can become Situation B, and C, and so on. The defence play it until the gap appears in the opposition press, when a ball to Smallwood allows Smallwood to move it on to a player who has become freed by the pressing.

Fyneman

Richard Feynman and Fred Hoyle used to drink in a pub in West Yorkshire. The man who coined the term Big Bang and the first man to watch a Nuclear Explosion with his own eyes hung around this part of the world.

There is a culture around Dick Feynman which has elevated him to a mythic status because he famously played the Bongos, and picked up women, safe cracker, and was an extrovert of sorts. Even watching the Nuclear Blast at Los Alamos might be a bit of Feynman-spin – everyone else was covering their eyes, after all – and the idea of Feynman has outgrown the reality.

But Richard Feynman made amazing Physics discoveries. Physics that far outstrips the tatty legend around him. It has given rise to the idea that you don’t need to know Physics to be Richard Feynman, you just need to feel like you are Richard Feynman.

Friends

Ninety-One pulled back and considered matters. There was so much to know, and it all felt new, but Oh-Two was less convinced. The problem with Oh-Two, the thing he finds hardest to shake, is the disparity between the good times and the bad.

In a way City’s rise to success in the late 1990s has set in the mind a way which success can be achieved which is not in the minds of supporters who have seen success in multi-facetted ways. When it was good it was one way, and every other way has been bad, so the answer is always obvious to Oh-Two, and it is always to do the things which Oh-Two likes.

Thirteen finds it hard to not agree and is right when he talks about what everyone says they want is captured in what he wants. “Why can that not be the way, the way that we always play?”

Contrast

Swindon Town were tough meat chewed down by a City team which played an entirely more advanced version of football. Holloway’s Swindon were regimented to having fixed three lines of players. Defenders gonna defend, midfielders are there to midfield. They worked hard, but they played with one arm tied behind their backs.

City, by contrast, had four or five rows of players. The back three, the wing backs passing or not the two deep sitting pivots, two dropping from the front with Cook up front being joined by those two. If someone told you that Swindon Town’s players worked twice as hard as City’s then they are probably not wrong, but in almost every instance City players outnumbered Swindon when it mattered.

If ever a football match illustrated why control mattered in games, why you try to have it, and what happens when you do not, it was Bradford City vs Swindon Town in December 2024.

We live split between two worlds.

There is the real world in which on the second of October it is raining as Bradford City head over to The Wirral to play Tranmere Rovers having lost 3-1 to Walsall at the weekend. This is a world in which football supporters, like everyone, feel the rising costs caused by economic mismanagement and poorly aligned incentives within that economy. This world feels increasingly hostile and increasingly unforgiving.

The real world has a duplicate self. This Doppelgänger world is a creative fantasy of a million minds working independently, but with the freedom to add almost any construct which can be imagined to explain the actions of the real world. It is the shadow of the real world.

At its most harmless, this shadow world is a fun place to be. It is a place where dogs and cats talk to each other, where cars have names and respond with ignition when asked nicely, where picking six numbers of significance to you will win you a fortune.

At the extreme, it is a terrifying place where the world is run by Satanists who use their power to do unspeakable horrors to children. In this world you are poisoned by the people who present themselves as helping you, and you are to be the subject of a cull in the population.

But we, all of us, live between those points.

Lacking

When 3-1 down to Walsall, Bradford City were playing poorly, and it seemed that they were playing poorly for want of on the field leadership. It seems true to say that if a team wants to win a football match then the sine qua non is to work hard, and that hard work was lacking.

No player, it seemed, could be accused of having played poorly, though. Match Magazine would not be giving out fours and five because no player was exceptionally poor, but none was especially good and none were making the effort to ensure the quality of the performance.

For a long time, Bradford City used to venerate former captain Stuart McCall. McCall was the definitional player who made those around him better. That kind of presence was conspicuous by its absence as the Saddlers rode to victory, untroubled.

Barcelona

The result of this result was a booing of manager Mark Hughes which made the papers, so to speak, but was probably not something which a man who has played at Bernabéu for Barcelona will lose much sleep over.

Hughes’ failure was distinct from the vitriol. He was being booed for losing a football match in which his team had shown a lack of leadership, and spent a good deal of the match hitting the ball hopelessly for two forwards to ineffectively chase. His failure was to attempt to graft the solutions of the shadow world onto reality, and to have allowed his thoughts to become confused between the two.

As such, Hughes is condemned to the fate of all in public life, in which he has to indulge the fantastic constructs of others while maintaining the hard grip on the reality of playing a football match.

Weather

There is a logical fallacy known as post hoc, ergo propter hoc – “it came after it, therefore it was caused by it” – which has it that anything which follows an event is the result of that event. Putting the washing on the line did not cause late afternoon rain, it is just a related coincidence.

The world which sits alongside the real one is heavily invested in this version of cause and effect, and much of the imagination that world demands comes in addressing the cognitive dissonance that results from the unreliability of this way of thinking. It did not rain this time, because I only put out jumpers, and no jeans.

That imaginative combatting of cognitive dissonance only works within the other world, though, because the hard logic of the real world reveals it. You can tell yourself all you want that the washing you have hung out and global weather patterns are connected, but they are not.

Removing

So a world is constructed where dropping Richie Smallwood is removing the player who holds back the long sweeping passes from back to front that would free up City to play two rampaging strikers, but a reality governs in which eleven players have lost the leader on the field.

A team which shod of a man who can take the ball under pressure – as was Smallwood’s role – end up whacking the ball forward towards Andy Cook and Tyler Smith only for Walsall’s Donervon Daniels to head clear.

This is the real world. Smallwood is not the problem which fiction creates, and having possession at the back is not football denied or delayed, it is the way the game is played specifically because of the ineffectiveness of rapid delivery to the final third for most teams.

Untethered

This is the hard problem which much of culture, including football, grapples with. As the unforgiving real world grinds and the enjoyment of fantasy becomes near limitless, the conversation has become dominated by the fanciful, the ephemeral, and the untethered.

It is the job of Mark Hughes, and the people who employ Mark Hughes, to know the difference between those two worlds.

Bradford City’s 2-1 win over Colchester United in the first game at Valley Parade of the 2023/24 season was the worst game of football I’ve seen and the future that it points to is dour, and depressing, and not worth my time.

This may be existential agast – I turn fifty this week – I’m going to argue that it is not. I’m going to argue that a set of bad solutions to unproblems have promoted a ludographic change in the sport which will damaged it fundamentally.

The theme of this discussion will be making changes to solve phantom issues. This theme will cleanse itself by discussion of Mark Hughes and his new tactical approach at Bradford City, but that will be a preparation for a broader, better, more interesting point.

Details

The details of the game hardly matter.

Joe Taylor gave Colchester United the lead when Harry Lewis was pressed into a turnover after six minutes. There was a pass forward in the finishing for the goal which looked to trigger an offside decision to me, but referee Marc Edwards set a tone for an afternoon where he was poor, but not the worst thing on show.

City equalised when a long ball to Andy Cook was headed down and after a fashion a rebound was put in from close range by Clark Odour. Odour had a part in the second after half-time when he played the ball onto Alex Pattison. Pattison scored a well taken goal.

I recommend watching the highlights. Indeed, all there is, is to watch the highlights.

Arrives

Earlier, Jamie Walker was booked for pulling an attacker’s shirt as that attacker breezed by the reduce City midfield. If it were so it was a grievous fault, and grievously has Walker answered it with the Yellow Card. Minutes later he was fouled, badly and again, and then substituted injured.

This arrives us at one of many problems within football today, albeit not the main problem,

Players are given the benefit of the doubt after making a bad tackles because the rules of the game are steadfastly opposed to the idea that one player may intentionally harm another. It is, the rules suggest and against the evidence of one’s eyes, unthinkable that the skilful player that is Walker would be targetted by some gnarled defender and, in being so, hampered. This does not happen, in the rules.

Yet those same rules see malice in almost all interactions which are non-violent. Every pulled shirt is a calculated attempt to prevent an advantage, every held ball the evidence of a planned operation to waste time, every mistimed stand up tackle is a player seeking to spoil the attacking flair of another.

It is, of course, a nonsense, but one that Referee Edwards plays the game within. Players are afraid to challenge for the ball, to pressure the opposition, to risk sanction, yet conversely they are aware that they will be forgiven the most egregious actions they can take.

Synecdoche

The rules of football have mutated into this form. One is always forced to ask what problems they are trying to solve? Later in the game, Emmanuel Osadebe featured a year on since the tackle which broke his leg six minutes into the first match at Valley Parade last season.

Both that violent lunge by Liam Ravenhill for Doncaster Rovers and Walker’s shirt pull on Saturday resulted in the same punishment. Without an evaluation of bad character, Ravenhill could not have possibly meant what he did, but Walker was obviously malicious because had it been accidental it would have been worse. There is only twisted logic to be found here.

Later Alex Pattison was tackled from behind and at distance by a Colchester midfielder who was uncautioned, leading to the obvious conclusion that Walker would have been better to make an aggressive tackle from behind on a player who had gone past him rather, than tug him back.

This is unexpected consequencies in action and I’m using it as a synecdoche for a wider problem. I’m building up a theme here.

Clean

So Hughes’ team won, but in an uninteresting way.

The shape is difficult to describe, but a 3-3wb-3-1 might cover it. The back three are struggling with their relationship with the two wing backs ahead of them, and Colchester had joy when they exploited that misunderstanding.

Richie Smallwood, the one in the middle, was more or less a spectator in the game watching the ball go over him to Cook, or around him as Hughes’ experimented with donut football. The game is played around the middle, or over it, but never through it. Alex Gilliead at left wing back showed more than most.

Gilliead’s job was largely to take the ball into possession from Ciaran Kelly and play it quickly with his right foot over the midfield to one of the three runners from the attacking midfield positions. While the unit shifted around the field only the three players in that line behind Cook needed to break from the donut, with Smallwood staying isolated in the middle, doing what Hughes asked, but being asked to do very little.

So the midfield was a lonely furrow, and Alex Pattison seemed to drop deep at times just to keep the captain company. Watching this system make short work of Colchester United with some ease as it and reverse the one goal deficit was interesting, although it did so without ever really revealing what the system would look like in the full flush of success.

Is this what a Donut 3-3wb-3-1 looks like when it is working? What problem is it here to solve?

Ninety Nine

It is a given that Bradford City 2022/23 were too predictable in that Cook was the focal point of attacking and if one stopped Cook, one stopped City. It seems that this newer vintage of Claret and Amber does not have that problem and is using the League’s top goalscorer as Big Jim Mark Two, or Barry Conlon Mark Three.

In Conlon, we have the apt comparison. Hughes’ team seems set up to play as if it were the last ten minutes football from the first whistle, but to do so at a glacial pace. Players are detailed to curious positions and then some are allowed to roam off-position to benefit from the chaos.

This is not Fernando Diniz or Henrik Rydström football, but it might be a projection of the same illumination, but begs the question as to what City will do when the game requires something other than sporadic firings of attacking football.

Measured, cautious, slow paced siege football requires a siege, and a wall, and a battering ram and City are often not short of any of these things, but what if the opposition want a game of football?

Gooseberry Season

“I could have told him this, but didn’t bother. We ran a bath, and held him under.” Simon Armitage.

At the end of the first half that saw Walker withdrawn injured, the officials had added nine minutes of stoppage time. Referees are instructed to make games run longer, to make up for the time lost, and to ensure that there are more minutes played. This instruction drifted down from up on high.

When I started watching football earnestly in the 1980s a football match had fifty-five minutes of active football in the ninety minutes. That number increased in the 1990s thanks to a series of innovations masterminded by Maestro turned Bureaucrat Michel Platini to sixty of the ninety, and has remained at that number ever since.

The signal of the number of minutes yet to be played being held aloft at the end of each half was an innovation of this era, as was the back pass rule which did much to create the modern game, and which Harry Lewis spent time regretting after the first goal in today’s match. In 1988 Lewis would have just picked up the ball.

Starting this year, the requirement to add time at the end of the forty-five minutes is geared around solving the problem of time-wasting. If it is a grievous fault, then grievously have we paid for it with around ten minutes seeming to be the minimum addition to each League Two match.

That time-wasting is not evident in this game – or it seems in most games – is immaterial. The change seeks to punish offenders and with no offender to punish, punishment was meted out to us, the people watching the game, in the form of a tedious absence of football.

Legal Man

When creating law, it is of vital importance to look beyond the problem solved, to the consequences of the solution.

Time-wasting in football is annoying but it mostly happens within play. The type of time-wasting that adding nine or ten minutes to the end of each half seeks to combat is already subject to punishments which could be enforced, should referees choose to enforce them.

While it might waste one’s time in general time-frittering is not time-wasting. When England were 2-1 up over Denmark in the last minutes of the Euro 2020 semi-final Harry Kane et al frittered the time away with 72 seconds of passing the ball around the field away from the Danes, but they did not waste that time. That that move ended with a Danish foul was not something the rules of football need to look to stop. There is a difference here.

When one recalls the managers most infuriating in recent seasons: Managers like Rob Edwards, Mark Cooper and Steve Evans; one is forced to also recall those managers send out teams to keep the ball away from the opposition in play, to slow down games by drawing fouls, and play for stoppages. They waste time in that they fritter that time away, lowering the productiveness of it for both teams, but that is different to those teams stealing from the clock.

Adding nine, ten, fifteen minutes onto the end of the game will not stop a Crawley or Forest Green player falling over under a light touch to win a free kick and avoid their team coming under pressure. It does not have to, as pressure is released, or more accurately cannot build, because of the added time itself.

Homo Ludens

In his seminal work Homo Ludens Dutch Historian Johan Huizinga details the development of games and specifically how games separate themselves from the real world. Why is it that white paint on grass creates a space in which a set of rules are respected inside, which are not respected outside that space?

From that, we can ask why is it that one game is played while another is not? Why is it that the game played on a 100×70 field with 22 people is more played than one played on a 200×140 with 44? Both are constructs, agreed upon by the participants as ways of behaving.

Nick Hornby talks about this in the seminal man-culture novel of the 1990s Fever Pitch, but never gets to an answer. Bernie De Koven in his The Well Played Game gets closer suggesting that fairness, and parity, are important and that what is interesting in a game is the point of balance where winning and losing lies.

Batball

De Koven imagines a typical bat and ball game where one party is unable to return the ball as being uninteresting, as is one where both can return the ball every time, pointing to the idea that what is compelling is the moment where that return exceptionally does or does not occur.

In Tennis we might gasp at a great shot which the opponent stretches for but is unable to return precisely because of that balance. A slightly poorer shot would have been returned, and perhaps a slightly better player would have returned it, but this is where the balance lies, and where our interest is.

I would argue, and I believe De Koven, Huizinga and Hornby would support this, that football is popular because it has these moments of balance occurring with regularity. The size of the field and number of players on it minimise the importance of individuals while maximising competition between individual players.

The size of the goals create an importance around accuracy and positioning for attacking players, yet seem too large to fully cover for defenders. The value of possession is based on space which is never too small to be useless but never too big to be luxurious. Football is football because of accidents of creation which have made something which maximises moments of balance, and of interest.

Dawkins Again

Who knows what the homo habilis or homo heidelbergensis of football were? Football is football because of the balances it exists within. The single unit of the game – the goal – as Hornby notes, occurs at the right level of frequency to be celebrated every time, and regretted when they do not occur.

More goals would render them boring, fewer would render the game boring. Every change sits in this context and while it is not impossible to make those changes, they risk replicating those sports which have previously failed. Add more goals and a set of Sticks to football and you’ve made Field Hockey, and that is already a less fun game than Football.

Humans did not evolve to play football, football evolved to be played by humans. It is possible that the things we ask of players are well suited to the peak of their abilities while being well rounded in those abilities. When we ask footballers to have stamina enough to regularly play seventy-five minutes of active football in two hour long games twice a week, we ask for a different type of player, a less well rounded one who is more focused on stamina.

Football is a near universal game, and most can share a field. Shaun Wright-Phillips and Peter Crouch played in the same England team because their individual talents are of use to that team. As long as Wright-Phillips is crossing to Crouch and not the other way around a successful pattern can be formed.

Rory

A football where playing four hours a week is common has stamina as the sine qua non of each player and difference is removed. For sure, all footballers need a level of fitness, but fitness is not the defining qualities of a footballer. Each player has the scope to be defined individually. Beckham is skillful, Fowler is deadly, Bellingham is balletic, Mount is aware. One replaces all those with players who are defined as having stamina.

Rory McArdle, in City’s record-breaking 2012/2013 season, played almost every minute of every game. It was an amazing achievement from one of my favourite players, and I struggle to think of any other player I’ve watched who could match that. Extrapolate the first few games of this season and McArdle’s remarkable achievement is asked of every player in almost every team.

And I like Rory McArdle, but I don’t want every player – every striker, every midfielder, every winger, every full back – to have to be Rory McArdle.

Dilution

Following Alex Pattison’s goal to make the game 2-1 the clock showed sixty minutes, although seventy had been played, of which using the ratio of one in every three minutes of a game downtime suggests that at that point forty-six minutes of active football had been played.

The clock had thirty minutes remaining, but all knew that that be added to by another ten minutes. That equates to a further twenty-six active football minutes spread over the next forty. It is worth remembering now that these new rules do not try to change the ratio of active football to downtime. They just increase time with the effect of increasing active time and downtime alike.

The active football then becomes less attractive because players have not been gifted the ability to put in more than ten minutes more of running, tackling, crossing, shooting, and harrying over the course of the summer. The same level of football gets drawn out over longer time. There is more active football, but it is less attractive. It is football played with dilution.

Given that the time after the thirty minutes left on the clock is unknown – although we assume ten minutes – and that the players would at this stage of a normal game have fifteen to twenty minutes of football within them, they are faced with an indeterminate amount of play.

True to form the Referee added nine and played ten minutes meaning another twenty-six minutes of active football making over seventy-two minutes for the third time in eight days for players who have trained on that being an extreme rather than typical.

Marathon

A Marathon, but only after twenty-one miles does the runner find out if the finish line is in five miles, or in fifteen.

After sixty minutes, unsure of where the finish line was, both teams acted in a way which was entirely to be expected. They opted to conserve energy.

For Colchester United there was no sense chasing an equalising goal because were they to do so – and exhaust themselves in the doing – they would surely concede to the less exhausted team in the lengthy stoppage time period which was to follow. Better to send the odd outrider to try to steal something rather than mount an assault.

For Bradford City there is no reason to try to score to kill the game off because, again, they would face a lengthy and unknown period of stoppage time in which they would be exhausted and Colchester United not.

Pep Talk

This reasoning might seem to but overmuch emphasis on exhaustion as a motivating factor, but not only would I argue it was evident at Valley Parade on Saturday, but that a great deal of modern football’s meta is around exhausting the opposition. Pep Guardiola has made a virtue out of forcing the opposition to chase the ball as it moves between his players, the opposition working hard to close down, and then being exploited when tired legs cannot cover space and Guardiola’s teams profit.

At Valley Parade – and no doubt in many other games – conserving energy was the defining factor of the match and rightly so. Why bust a gut to get out of midfield to try to score when the liability of being exhusted is greater than the benefits of scoring? Colchester United had more chance of scoring as a team with energy in stoppage time than they did of not conceding as a team without it having equalised in normal time.

So every game becomes one of attrition or avoiding attrition. There are attempts at goal within the game, for sure, but there is no onus on either team to act in any way which is decisive. Better avoid being easy meat for a late feast.

Stoppage

When stoppage time comes City have a small flourish, Colchester United not so, but it comes to nothing with neither teams able to give that final push to make a fist of a game. After the whistle, a half a dozen players of each side are laying on their backs, in a way which broke the heart against Carlisle United three months ago. Ambition should be made of sterner stuff.

After giving one’s all, all season, only to lose a game, and feel like there was nothing left to give to avoid that loss tested the heart on the pitch at Carlisle. Eight months of hard work had gone to naught after extra time in a play-off defeat in late May.

But this is August, and after a win, and both sets of players look exhausted.

Random Weavings

The fundamentals of fifty years of football change before your eyes.

Why press an attack if the exhaustion caused by that will rob you in an attritional stoppage time? Why add to a teammate’s attack at a cost to yourself in the final recogning of the game? When Clark Odour charges out of midfield, why keep up with him, knowing that you need that energy for the unknown swathes of injury time? Better watch his random weavings while saving energy for yours. Fitness and tiredness will be decisive.

For many of the players, Saturday’s game is amougst the top three longest active football matches they have had in their careers, but the other two have been within the last eight days.

The Marathon, but only after twenty-five miles do the runners who have trained for twenty-six, find out if the finish line is after thirty-two miles, or thirty-nine.

Aimless

Odour or Pattison or Tyler Smith or Taylor or any other Colchester player make another unsupported run forward and there is something to enjoy in the weaving darts out of midfield, but this is not football of pressure.

Pressure is to football what Iambic pentameter is to Shakespeare. It undergirds, and important in a way which is significant. Shakespeare without rhythm is just kicking a ball about, and football without pressure is a talentless hack stumbling through Marc Anthony.

That pressure can only come when the balance between expending energy and the risks of exhaustion is well poised in the way that De Koven frames it. The risks of tiredness are greater than the rewards of applying pressure.

Without pressure, attacks become discreet memes of football, each one unconnected to the last. Defence becomes rest defence, aiming players away from goal, waiting for turnovers, but never forcing them.

This looks good on TikTok, a player dribbling past defenders in a twelve-second clip, but it is not the football we know and it forgoes afternoons for spectators in favour of clips for the swipers.

Old Man, Cloud

_(We are all doomed to dream in nostalgia. Elements of the past and elements of the future coming together to make something which is not as good as either. I do not know if this is mine.)_

_(I’ve seen changes come and go, and come and stay, and addressed them all on merit and found many to be good but this one to be alienating and bad.)_

_(If this is the rubicon I drift over in a sleep, then that is so, but being awakened I do despise my dream.)_

So What Now?

In a measured interview after the defeat, Ben Garner the Colchester United Manager said that his team had played two lengthy games this week and felt that that had contributed to the defeat in which he felt his team fell short of what was expected.

City had played three. There are murmurings that this cannot be the status quo. By the time Chelsea play Liverpool, the game runs to five minutes of stoppage time each half.

Frost

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood.

Along one path, there is a pulling back to something more like previous seasons, where game time returns to something more reasonable most of the time, and what is asked of players is in keeping with what has always been asked.

The month of 120 minute games goes the way of walking free kicks forward and penalty shoot-outs at the end of draws in League games, and many other ideas that failed to evolve.

Along the other, a game called football continues, but it is changed, and changed to tedious afternoons like Saturday where deep sitting players conserve energy against opposition runners who push mostly two, in frequently three, forward and no more.

Then there are stories without structure, stanzas without rhythm, and games without tempo, or purpose, or point.

Post-Script

_(Making dinner and the radio is on. What was six-o-six is popularism pandered from unqualified former footballers. A Caller talks about how when supporters pay to watch ninety minutes of football, they should get ninety minutes of football.

Never mind the quality, feel the width. How ill white hairs become a fool and jester.

Make less thy body hence, and more thy grace; Leave gormandizing. Know the grave doth gape.

Football is a game played on a Saturday afternoon.

I’ve spent most of my life, which ebbs to a fiftieth year this month, watching it at Valley Parade and some of those ninety minutes have had a life changing impact. The game of football unfolds as a grand narrative of point and counterpoint, of disappointment and direction, of the drama of the real.

That decorated footballer and manager Mark Hughes entered the narrative was a curious moment in that drama, but that curiosity has given way to a metronomic, sincere competency. Mark Hughes’ Bradford City have become a watch word for stability.

Always Mark Hughes’ Bradford City. Never miss the prefix.

That prefix features frequently in previews of this season. Mark Hughes’ Bradford City are placed firmly in the five teams which could get one of the three automatic promotion places this season and their position is clear: Understudy.

Dawkins

When biologist Richard Dawkins coined the term memeification in his 1976 book The Selfish Gene he spoke of how culture could be passed in the same way that genetic code was. The useful was retained and propagated. It is useful if an animal can reach the higher branches, so the animals with long necks live while others do not, and then: Giraffe.

The rise of meme culture, inherently tied into online culture, it has grown to a rate where it has consumed Dawkins almost entirely. In Meme culture, an outcome of memeification, a concept’s complexity is stripped away to allow it to pass between groups without friction.

So memeification is changing culture, football, and next season will govern League Two as Wrexham return to the Football League.

Matthews

Wrexham are a proud football club, and have a proud history, and they are managed by the peerless Phil Parkinson whose name is a byword for better times at Valley Parade.

Wrexham have moments of knocking Arsenal out of the FA Cup, and of being knocked out by Rhyl. Sir Stanley Matthews wore a Wrexham shirt, as did Alan Hill. Ryan Valentine scored to keep them in the League, but they dropped out of the League.

None of that matters, though, because they were bought by Hollywood’s second-best Ryan and a guy called Rob from that TV show you always promise yourself you’d watch but never did.

Hamlet

I have not seen much of Welcome To Wrexham, in which Ryan Reynolds and Rob McElhenney navigate the perils of being the owners of a small football club, but I’m told it is not without its charms.

The pair act as Stoppards’ Rosencrantz and Guildenstern constantly away from the action while contemplating their importance to it. Phil Parkinson comes over as an honest, good football man, which is certainly my memory of him, and the player serve up a slice of their lives.

But Wrexham is not Manchester United, and football at this level is difficult even when one has more money, a path forward, and the will to succeed. Welcome to Wrexham, some of us have been here quite a while.

Not Crewe

So it is not Wrexham who are most fancied to win this League but Ryan Reynolds’ Wrexham, and they are followed by Notts County who are pulled into the swirl as the Baby Jane of Wrexham story.

Salford City, owned by a group of former Manchester United players seemingly headed of Sky TV’s Gary Neville make the mix, and so do Stockport County who are remarkable for being unremarkable in this instance.

This is the impact of memeification. The complexities of League Two stripped away to a list: Ryan Reynolds’ Wrexham, The Bad Guys Notts County, Mark Hughes’ Bradford City, Gary Neville’s Salford City and also Stockport County.

Stockport County are interesting. Manager Dave Challinor has a kind of minor note in post-technocratic football alongside the much more important new Brazil and Flumense manager Fernando Diniz and Malmo’s Henrik Rydstrom. These teams are less interested in creating the kind of preset patterns which mark out modern football and are more interested in harnessing creative thinking in attacking play. New signing Nick Powell’s role in that may prove decisive this season, and Challinor may break out of his meme as “the long throw man”.

Nigel Clough’s Mansfield Town, Just Stop Vegan Green Rovers, “Owned by a bunch of idiots” Crawley Town and so on. Maybe it has always been like this. Maybe it is not a bad thing.

Pitch

Often when talking about football we avoid talking about football. We talk about the football themed theatre that surrounds the game – and Wrexham are the prime example of this – but we avoid talking about what happens on the field. Transfers, quotes, filmed training, player interviews, speculation. These are all things around the football which are mistaken for, but are not actually, football.

The discussion is of a become a replaying of personal dramas tangential to the game itself. League Two offers these for Bradford City next season with Parkinson’s return a moment of reflection of how far we have come since he left for Bolton Wanderers, and Derek Adams‘ return a similar moment when Morecambe arrive.

Those moments, I imagine, will be used to define those games but have little to do with them. Increasingly, football is a more technical pursuit. Adams at Valley Parade brought a move towards player data performance at Bradford City which Mark Hughes continued without question.

The Bloke

Within the last generation all football has moved away firmly away from being defined by passion, and the laudable desires to give 110%, into a more scripted approach. Watching Brighton on the field is like watching a Musical, where actions give way to set responses. Watching Hughes’ City team play the ball away from the back has a similar feel.

City try draw on an opposition out of the resting defence, who set traps in passing lanes to quickly force turnovers, while the flow of players between the forward lines give a series of rotating options to disrupt that defence.

“No, we did not play 442 and boot it long to the big man, and we don’t smoke between games or have a pint before the match either.”

GAAaS

Key to how Hughes will play is the performance of Kevin McDonald who comes in to replace the departing Adam Clayton. Clayton’s fulcrum pivot role at the base of the midfield was key to City’s excellent second half of the season, and McDonald’s job is to do the same while being fitter.

The deep sit midfield has retained Alex Gilliead and Richie Smallwood, although the latter was under contract, and if every two players reflected the football of technical analysis rather than instinctual readings it is they. “Get forward”, “Get stuck in”, “Get it in the net” are heard, best passing rate, high win percentage, GAAaS are observed. It is Reals before Feels for Mark Hughes, and for football.

Ryan East suggests himself as the first reserve in those positions, although one might hope he might start to suggest himself more firmly, and many of the more forward minded players can drop in to the three-man pivot midfield.

The two-man double pivot where Smallwood and probably McDonald sit behind three forward midfielders is another option and the success of that depends on the progress of Jamie Walker. Walker was, at times and between the tackles, the best player in League Two last season, which seemed to be so noted by the opposition who focused him.

Scots-ish

If Walker plays well, City win, on the whole, but the key to him playing well would seem to be to have enough options around him that he is no longer the focus of the opposition’s attention.

Enter here Alex Pattison joining from Harrogate Town. Pattison and Walker are not similar players – Walker drifts into space to find the ball, Pattison picks it up deep and moves forward with it – but they perform a similar task of changing midfield possession into attacking and the hope will be that the one will distract from the other. Likewise, a fully fit Emmanuel Osadebe could do the same.

Alongside these three are the likes of nominal midfielders Harry Chapman and Bobby Pointon, and Tyler Smith and Matt Derbyshire of the forwards, who will be peopling the positions behind Andy Cook. Perm any two from four, and play the ones who are performing well.

In a world of memeification Cook is the Medieval Siege Engine rolled up to the Castle walls. It takes an age to get it where you want it to be, but when it gets there, there is no stopping it. Cook is terrific and has the kind of energy which a manager wants. For all the appearance of a blood and guts number nine Cook conserves his bursts, and can be trusted on the field.

And so Hughes’ trusts him with Bradford City’s season. Attempts have been made to add a few more goals from the midfield, but Cook’s thirty plus are factored in. Verdaine Oliver stands by, and is useful in that way.

Best

Footballer turned Podcaster turned Footballer Ben Foster turned up to play for Wrexham in a signing which was mostly a brand alignment exercise, and now he is being talked about as League Two’s best goalkeeper by people who probably do not know their Corey Addai from their elbow.

Harry Lewis is the best keeper I’ve seen in goal for City since Jordan Pickford, and perhaps the best City owned keeper since Matt Clarke and Gary Walsh. I would suggest that he is too good for League Two, but seeing Lawrence Vigouroux leave Leyton Orient to sit on the bench while Burnley blood England u21’s James Trafford is a sobering sight.

Vigouroux was the best keeper in League Two for some time and he may well claim the number one shirt at Turf Moor but if he does not then talent is wasted, and Lewis avoids that waste by keeping goal at Valley Parade. Long may it continue.

Sam Stubbs was the heart of improvements in the second half of the season and will in the back four alongside – probably – Matty Platt. Ciaran Kelly, Ash Taylor and perhaps Timi Odusina give Hughes’ the option of a three-man back line with two-man pivot and three in font of that. That formation is still a work in progress after some creaking pre-season but is seems obvious that Hughes wants to blood it to give himself more flexibility in how City play.

As wide defenders Liam Ridehalgh and Clarke Oduor on one side, and Brad Halliday and Daniel Oyegoke on the other fill out the options.

So Now Then

It is tempting to suggest after a full season that Hughes has to – in some way – “get it right” this season and CEO Ryan Sparks has talked about setting high standards as a quixotic mantra. My belief is now, and always has been, success is a product of good behaviours and not the other way around that Sparks seems to understand that too.

Hughes’ has City doing the right things and his changes in the squad seem to underline his belief in bringing in players with a high level of professionalism. Matt Derbyshire’s arrivial and Jake Young’s departure set a tone about seniority, experience, and what one does in the positions one is given.

The Mark Hughes name seems to be enough to get City mentioned in hallowed circles but seemingly only as the understudy for the likes of Wrexham who might fail. There is a stablity in what City have, and lack of variance, and that is not true of the other clubs in the division.

For what it is worth I think that Wrexham, and Notts County, may faulter but Stockport will not, but what do I know other than that everything will be decided on the 113 x 70 yard space on a Saturday afternoon where the noise around football drops away and there is just football.

Those afternoons are glorious. They are a moment where complexity runs amok, and where the simple is impossible. Every action, the result of and part of a chain of complex pre-actions which could never resolve in football, the cacophony of discussion is replaced by the symphony of the real.

Destiny is a story about Joe Carmody, a Boxer who becomes a Private Investigator. It opens American writer Ethan Coen‘s collection Gates of Eden and sets the tone of noir with a comic twist

Carmody, an intellectual too smart for pugilism, is pulled into an engagement spying on one Promoter as he indulges in a proxy affair with another Promoter’s wife. It is about smart people playing dumb and dumb people playing smart, and involves Joe taking a lot of beatings.

After his final pummelling, during which he has never landed a blow on an opponent, Joe wonders aloud what it would have been like to be a little bit better. “Always a beating, I don’t understand it.”

“I may be a little slower than the other guy, but not that much. I may be a little less strong, but I don’t get beat by a little, I get the crap pounded outta me. Why is that?”

Review

When thinking about Bradford City in the 2022/2023 three stories in Coen’s Gates of Eden came to mind. The season was the club’s first under manager Mark Hughes and concluded with a sixth placed finish. In Andy Cook City had League Two’s top scorer, and in Harry Lewis they had the best goalkeeper since Jordan Pickford learned to shout between the sticks.

To iterate through results, but more so to recall, there was improvement. The mid-season arrival of Adam Clayton and Sam Stubbs saw Hughes able to be flexible in the shape he set his players with and increased competition for places.

From 62 miles up Hughes is contesting with a mental frailty in League Two players which his career in the Premier League has not prepared him for. It feels unfair to draw a line and suggest that the players on one side of it are bad mentality, and the others good, but Lee Angol’s exit for Matt Derbyshire illustrated this point. They both enjoy being footballers, but probably Derbyshire enjoys it for the reasons Hughes finds useful.

Minnesota

Costa Minapolidan feels like an abandoned idea from Fargo oozing as it does with Minnesota Nice. It tells the story of a group of Gangsters who move to the snowy cold from Chicago’s South Side, competition having become a little fierce, and decide to bring this thing we do with them.

On arriving in the 1960s Joe de Louis, the head of the small crime family, “don’t care about your problems” but over the decades as he attempts to make the environment a product of his will, the environment shapes him back. “Nudsun” is murdered, but the locals assume it was a terrible mistake, and one by one the Gang begin to assimilate into the community.

Joe de Louis opens a barber shop, he dies an old man, found by one of his customers and buried in a pauper’s grave.

Bratfud

Hughes does not seem to be especially interested in leaving Bradford City. Hughes standards taller than most and things develop well alongside him after a long career, he has found a place where football is more malleable, and he can be more the author of his destiny.

Slowly his squad begins to tend towards interesting shapes. He uses players in interesting ways, and pushes those players to their edges. Alex Gilliead, who Hughes has played in a few positions, has been taking on roles within those positions which the manager asks him to do.

One game Gilliead is moving into any pocket of space he can find to be given a pass to feet, the next he is pressing forward and taking the ball on a half turn to get away from a midfielder, while the next he is tucking in to defend a lead. The latter often ineffectively, but given Gilliead was the inefficient winger, we should recall Dr Johnson in these matters.

Without wanting to be critical of him, Gilliead shows the heart of Hughes’ problem and the 2022/23 season. A limited player played to his limits, the regnant assumption is that there was a possibility that City could have been better, perhaps should have been, and that this season represents a missed opportunity.

Free

Opportunity, as a concept, relies on the assumption that there is a better outcome that one could have had in some situation and that outcome was forsaken, and looking at 2022/23 I struggle to see that. Of course, one can look at moments in games and spot mistakes and wish that those mistakes had not happened, but that does not seem to capture the idea of a missed opportunity.

Was it a missed opportunity that Jamie Walker was out for four months? Was Emmanuel Osadebe’s sixth minute leg break on the first day of the season a missed opportunity? What opportunity does losing two significant players afford for a club? What opportunity did Alex Gilliead pass up in playing as well as Alex Gilliead has ever played? Was there an opportunity to get more goals out of a 32-year-old journeyman Andy Cook?

Lest this be seen as a needling of superficial language, I use the phrase as synecdoche for an attitude ill fits the season played. Bradford City were not the default success of 2022/23, there was no opportunity other than that which represented the peak of City’s performance.

City, Hughes, We, did as well as we were ever going to do, and it is fine to regret not being lucky, but I may be a little less strong, but I don’t get beat by a little, I get the crap pounded outta me.

Spanish

In The Boys a Father takes Davey and Bart, his two young sons, camping, trying to navigate the road and the whims of the children he sometimes sees. One will not be separated from a Sesame Street catalogue but shows no interest in the Sesame Street characters, the other repeats his phrases in a way which Father is obviously more irritated than flattered by.

Spanish Rice, a dish that Davey claims to like, leads Father to take his son to a restaurant to try an interesting meal, but Davey casts the dish aside. Spanish Rice, it turns out, is just a name for White Rice with Ketchup mixed into it. Bart wants an omelet. “Can’t they make Bart an omelet, huh Dad?” repeats Davey.

The last line is contraception: “What did they want with him? Who were they?”

“Donde termina el arco iris, en tu alma o en el horizonte?” – Pablo Neruda

Chile

The Soul, Pablo Neruda writes, is earned through suffering and thought and prayer, and perhaps it is the lack of those things which made Manchester City’s title celebrations such an unwatchable affair.

There is suffering of course – Amnesty International have views on Manchester City’s owners – but not in the Nerudian sense of the word. Manchester City’s success feels like casual background lore written for a forgotten Science Fiction, or what success would look like if it were filmed as background scenes for a movie.

Football’s search for a soul has been documented best by David Conn, himself a Manchester City supporter of sorts, but in the two decades since his seminal The Beautiful Game this search seems to have failed, and failed again, leading us here.

Carlisle

Bradford City’s attempt to be promoted from League Two wilted in the heat of Carlisle. A single goal advantage earned at Valley Parade was turned around by Paul Simpson’s Cumbrians who were able to counter and nullify Mark Hughes’ side’s play.

Simpson reflected after the first leg that his side had performed well in the second half of the first leg and the learnings from that rolled into the Saturday afternoon second leg encounter. Jamie Walker was kept away from the ball with a defender dedicated to cutting off passing lanes to the playmaker. Fellow Scot Scott Banks was pushed wider and wider by a capable backline and going wider saw him further from Andy Cook. Simpson’s success – a success which has eluded many a manager this season – was knowing that to keep Cook quiet, one isolates him from his teammates.

Callum Guy, a bit part player in the recent decline of Bradford City, found positions between City’s midfielders breaking up the play in that area while the two wing backs came inside to create a structure that broke the lines between City’s players. Good football is making the other team play badly.

Scunthorpe

In contrast, Hughes’ City struggled to play in the second of the two styles adopted this season. That style, which saw Adam Clayton shielding a back four and moving the ball to two Mezzala midfielders, represented an alternative to the Double Pivot which had marked out much of the rest of the season. Neither worked, and the shortcomings of the team were exposed.

Hughes has created a squad largely from the scraps left over from previous managers. Players like Cook, and Alex Gilliead, and Liam Ridehaigh have been a part of a team which on the whole performed better than could be expected given their careers. Gilliead’s time as captain of a pathetic and moribund Scunthorpe United side did not suggest he would be a leading midfielder for a team pushing for promotion, but he was.

Simpson’s Carlisle were made of more flexible materials and that difference showed as City were exhausted of ideas but maintained a position in the game that might have given a win on penalties. It was a small return on a season, but it was better than the conclusion of most seasons.

Ultimately, the message was clear. City had lost to a better team, and nobody needed to tell Mark Hughes that. Hughes’ regime is one of competency, and in that spirit he was able to create a team which of metronomic point gathering rather than smashing opponents in single games.

London

A day later, and West Ham United seemed to all but end Leeds United’s hope of Premier League survival with a 3-1 victory at Not Upton Park. There was humour in the Leeds United support dressing as Sam Allardyce, but it was largely for others. The rivals from West Yorkshire made another desperate lunge for a manager, and that lunge obviously failed.

As retrospect dawns East of Pudsey, that failure is obvious. Leeds United were seduced into sacking Marcelo Bielsa with the temptation of extending their time in the Premier League. The mistake was made at that point, not with Large Sam, and the Faustian bargain is in the process of being paid.

There is little sympathy afforded to Leeds United from BD8, but Bielsa was an iconoclast and a far better manager than most, and to have him and lose him feels like an era defining mistake. The cost, for seven wins from thirty-seven, seems too high.

Queens

American film director Martin Scorsese describes the last scenes of his 1990 release Goodfellas as being of a man who has sold his soul and is left with the regret that there is no more soul left to sell. Football seems to be a succession of this type of auction.

Which is to say that Leeds United, in whatever way one defines that entity, sold their soul in the same way which Manchester City did albeit for a smaller price, and the same way that most clubs do and will.

Where does football earn a soul? On the Horizon, as Neruda would suggest, or in the moments when success is denied? Manchester City’s vacuous celebrations suggest that there is no soul at that horizon. That success is not a goal so much as an end of goals.

The landmarks of football are found on the roads that pass hills too low to name. The Wasteland. Datta. Dayadhvam. Damyata.

Manningham

Bradford City 2023/2024 feels exciting to me, but I have long since realised that what I like and what normal football supporters seem to enjoy often do not overlap. I’m eager to see the continued development of the set of ideas which animate the club, and confident in those developing it.

Freely, I will admit that I don’t understand the agitation of many of my peers. I read that City “did not turn up”, or that “optimism is gone”, or that have spent the season in the time-honoured tradition of being a grown man bellowing at young footballers.

I have no way of relating to those thoughts. They feel like missives from people so long fighting a battle that everything resembles an enemy. They feel like the soullessness that would consume us all.