Intersonic – an apology!

In light of my post on Valley Parade’s new sponsors it appears I owe the company concerned, Intersonic, something of an apology. They do indeed have a proper website, which can be found here. I did “google it” at the time, obviously the site description and tags weren’t clear enough for me, and as soon as I found this site, I was quick to rush in with a judgement.

Unfortunately it goes to further confirm how easy it is to be cynical about anything that happens in relation to Bradford City FC nowadays.

Going back to what I know

I finally took the plunge yesterday, and popped up to Valley Parade to see City take on, and convincingly beat, Tranmere 2-0. It was an enjoyable enough game but handing over £20 really made me realise the poor value of the product, with having a season ticket for 20 of the last 21 years I suppose I hadn’t really thought about the value that much but, for me, it’s well overpriced.

Which is one of (but far from the only) the reasons that crowds are around the 8,000 mark, with a stadium that holds 25,136 people you’d have thought that getting into the place would be a simple enough task, well you’d be wrong. I wanted to sit in the Midland Road Stand, but there were no pay turnstiles open for that stand, so I wandered round to the ticket office to get a ticket – only to find a long slow-moving queue with only fifteen minutes until kick-off, I couldn’t be bothered waiting so ducked into the ground sitting in the Kop Stand behind the goal, which wasn’t much of a problem as the viewing from anywhere within the home sections of the stadium is pretty good – why they have so few cash turnstiles (2) for the whole stadium is beyond me but what do I know? after all I’ve only been visiting football, and rugby league, grounds for the last 21 years of my life.

Anyway, onto the game itself, it was reasonably entertaining but, as you’d expect, lacking in real quality. The team have certainly improved in the way they play the game on last season, which was good to see, and we are going well in the league. We were in sixth going into the game against second placed Tranmere and are now up to 4th courtesy of the in. I think we have every chance of doing something judging by what I saw yesterday, the fact we were playing another of the better teams, and what I have seen of this league in the past. One worrying thing is that a few of our better players are only on loan deals, so trying to get them signed up on a longer basis should be something the club is working on if it wants to build a serious promotion push. We got the ball down on the floor, passed it well, and attacked with pace and width – it’s a stark contrast to the displays ever since Colin Todd took charge and hopefully we can keep it up.

As well as my plans to move away for a bit the reason I hadn’t got a season ticket for this year was the general dourness of the football, not just under Todd, but over the last 5 seasons or so, the club has been in decline and we’ve had a succession of negative managers turning out teams playing in an uninspiring manner – It all got too much for me in the end, and going to games was more of a chore than something I was doing because I enjoyed it. The big stadium and small crowds don’t help create an enjoyable atmosphere at the best of times, and in recent years matchday’s have just not been an enjoyable experience all-round. While the football is better at the moment, for me it still far from justifies the cost and, though I’ll be back again next week for the big local derby with Huddersfield Town, I certainly won’t be shelling out twenty quid to watch any more games in the time before I head off to Madrid.