The Voice - Match preview Bradford City vs Crewe Alexandra Saturday 27 August @ 3:00pm

I appreciate your post and all, but we hit the crossbar, and that's not something Crewe planned or coped with.

The penalty, to me, was stone wall and a possible red card.

Same as with Donny - they got tons of praise for defending, but if I remember right we hit the wood work twice!

That's not good defending - that's getting lucky.

 

You seem like a good poster.

Hope you stick around!

 

I'll stick around at least long enough to admit you were right when we secure our play off place.

 

Well, go back a few seasons and both parts of that sentence came true! To be fair to the grumblers, we did draw too many; just 4 of those becoming wins would have seen us in 2nd, if (a very big if) everything else would have remained the same.

There are promising signs now, more so than in the seasons since 2016, but we are very much a work in progress.

RCB

 

Flat performance, but the booing is just moronic and cannot get my head around, unless the booing was aimed at the ref for those penalty decisions in injury time?

 

Halliday is poor. Too many mistakes, too lackadaisical on the ball. I’d rather have Hendrie back in there.

Smallwood was best player on the pitch. He’s the only one that looks forward an actually plays the ball into space. The rest of our midfield/defence won’t pass further than 10 yards.

I was worried this would happen at the start of the season. Lose Walker an our attacking output goes to shit

Angol doesn’t work on the wing but we all already knew that apart from Hughes

Young looks like a good player but can’t cross for shit

Banks is a good player but unless we play another winger on the opposite side, there’s no point solely relying on him as teams will simply double on him as they did today.

The Crewe attackers looked like they had a bit of ability about em but our defence kept them quiet so il give them that

 

What's unfair about the criticism? It's been a solid but underwhelming start to tge season, where there's already a pattern emerging whereby we play nice football without creating much. 2 of our 3 home games have been goalless and we clearly struggle against teams who defend deep. Why would gang not talk about it or question decisions such as Angol playing on the left which clearly doesn't work, or signing a target man are rarely crossing the ball?

 

I think that's exactly who it was aimed at.

 

The same fans who applaud Andy cook for piling into their defender with no aim of getting the ball ? Giving needless free kicks away when the defender was boxed in and looking for contact to go to floor is not clever.

 

What are you basing that on though Jon? I’m worried. Our current ratio is 2:2:2 and the xG has been dire, backing up what I see with my own eyes - we are not creating enough chances to win matches at the ratio you are expecting us to hit.

Home form is a real worry. We’ve created little against Doncaster and Crewe in those games and although we did beat Newport, it took a ‘freak’ goal to open the scoring. Smallwood won’t score many all season, nor will many other players from that range.

We are in trouble if we have promotion aspirations as we’re playing like a Derek Adams side with a Derek Adams set up. Hughes isn’t a p***k, unlike Derek, but the results and football is no better.

 

Watching match of the day last night and when crosses came into the box there are four or five waiting for them. With us there is one in the case of a fantastic cross from Oliver Zero. We play “good football” in our own half and we are totally ineffective in our opponent’s

 

No way was Smallwood best player on the pitch yesterday. Quite frankly he was no better than Halliday who you have lambasted in the same post.

My man of the match was Platt, he never put a foot wrong all afternoon

 

Oh you expect the play offs?

Them expectations have dropped. At the start of the season most on here had us down for winning the league and couldn’t understand how teams would finish above us.

I always feel when someone says they expect their team to finish in the playoffs it’s like a way of coping with failure when in truth Bradford City should be expecting automatic promotion.

However, I did say we would finish about 10th people on here couldn’t believe it!

 

Agree. Both Centre Backs were good, though they didn’t have much defending our own box to do. They were on the front foot and kept us in their half. Not that we did much with it.

 

Unless we bring in a more attacking quality, and/or adapt our play to have more of a threat, we’ll struggle for playoffs. And we’ll have no chance of top 3.

 

Halliday hasn’t done much wrong since joining, certainly defensively anyway which although I like modern full backs their defensive capabilities are still their most important asset. As you imply it wasn’t one of Smallwoods better games for us, probably his worst although he wasn’t terrible just wasteful. I think some have got into the habit of not even paying him attention, it’s Smallwood so he must have played well and just look at a player they aren’t keen on to micro analyse and criticise.

 

Can't really disagree with any of that. Smallwoods problem is he's taking all the responsibility on his shoulders and is trying to do everything. Folk are rightly pointing out our centre backs are playing well but don't seem to understand the part Smallwood plays in that form. Amazing what difference it makes to a centre back having that quality in front of you. His set piece ball is poor though and needs working on.

 

Smallwood is very efficient in his job breaking up play and finding a man with a pass. He is a sitting midfielder his recent partner and some peoples scapegoat Gillead was badly missed yesterday his drive from deep was missing from our game

 

No,just realism. I think we have a soft underbelly away from home and will get little from Mansfield or Tranmere.

 

Sutton is by far the best player to play alongside Smallwood in midfield with his drive and workrate, He looks to pass forward all the time probing the opposition and running at them creating spaces for the attacking players. It may sound a bit cynical but am beginning to think that the reason he does not start is because he tries to pass forward instead of sideways and pretty little triangles like the other players in defence and midfield. Sutton will have his odd bad game like all players but at the moment is our best attacking midfield option.