DPL v Bradford City

My visits to Valley Parade date back to the days of the 3-sided ground, the last one being in the 65/66 promotion year when we clinched the title there.

I don’t remember any really great matches and looking back, we haven’t beaten them for 3 years.

I can’t say I’m confident this time unless you regard the performance on Tuesday as a harbinger. We’ve had a lot of potential harbingers, but few have fulfilled our expectations. Nevertheless, whilst 3 successes in a row have not happened recently we have managed two. So you might suggest that if we can match Wigan we might have a chance of achieving something against Bradford who have not won in the league since they beat us.

So perhaps it will be closer than I was thinking before I started to actually study recent results.

I see Taylor spent some minutes on the pitch on Tuesday and I suppose we can at least expect some speedy runs and crosses if he can reproduce his best form and that might spell a threat if the strikers can coordinate their runs into the box.

At the back we now have McGrath who seems to rank as a useful asset to suppress the Bradford front line. Let us hope that Jones can involve himself effectively in protecting the goal.

I can’t stay pessimistic too long, so 1-1 (Ironside/Faulkner/Molyneux).