It never crossed my mind until I read a tweet the other day from a random guy (Ben West)...
It was an innocuous tweet and very innocent but something this random guy, who isn't a City fan for the record, took time to write and think about. I don't think it was a flippant remark and his response was to this stat:
And therein lies the rub. Compared to last season we are banging them in and turning those men behind ball draws to out of the blocks from the off wins!
A quick look at the bookies tells a similar story - Paddy Power are giving us a strong 21/10 to win the league with Charlie Wyke being 16/1 top goal scorer. Also as a caveat to this, they actually have a free £20 bet via the link above, random I know - but I've just lumped a tenner on each of those outcomes. Worth spending nothing IMO.
Will they both come in, will we get the holy grail of a Championship trophy and a top goal scorer a'la Sheffield United and Billy Sharp? As it stands I'm quietly confident, key word there being 'quietly'. I won't go head-on into the Twittersphere with my confidence but instead, keep it under lock and key until the time is right.
Back in July we speculated about promotion - see HERE and the bloomin' Guardian also called it over the summer - HERE
Not everyone was or is disillusioned to our chances of promotion but to sing it from the roof top is something we shouldn't be doing.
Why though? Becuase we're Bradford City, we have never done a Sheffield United and we tend to do things the harder way. The Bradford way. Why win the league when you can scrape over the line into a play-off final. But as it stands the ingredients for the success are there; Wyke is on form, we're scoring goals from all areas of the pitch and McCall has his tactics bob-on. Injuries aside we have the squad to take us up, all we need now is for others to notice our threat and use it to our advantage. Going back to the original tweet above you can see people view us as a good side but they aren't scared of us, we need to strike fear into the opponents and literally bulldozer teams out of the way. It's the only way we'll win this league, playing good football and scoring loads of first half goals counts for nothing unless we show our dominance every single game.
**At the time of writing the above we hadn't yet travelled to Bury. But all I think that display did was inherintely cement the ideas of above. Without the fire in our belly and the ability to dominate with every chance we get - we won't be winning anything quickly.
Tom Fletcher