2002-2003 Preview

August 2002

We chose to be here

How does one preview a season that came within hours of never happening? Had The PFA at one point and Doctor Rhodes at another not weighed in with pretty green then Bradford City would not be lining up to play Wolves at Valley Parade on Sunday the 11th of August, 2002.

At one point all our best case scenarios involved Nicky Law, Ian Banks and a handful of junior professionals taking the field. Ironically of those kept on when the administrators sacked the squad quite a few emerge as key players for the Bantams this term. One must hope that the will have the chance to grow this year as opposed to being thrust into the hub of the first team as it looked like they would be. Technically speak Mark Bower, who six months ago could not get arrested in Bradford, is the club's longest serving player having survived the cull with his new contract intact.

This is the season that might never have been.

Even if it was, and by the looks of it it is, then it might have been a laughable, pitiable fight against relegation with a handful of half decent players, a season of humiliation.

Nevertheless Bradford City enter the field against Wolves very much the same as the team that walked off the field at Walsall in the back end of April and that is, even in this club's curiously impressive while modest history, bloody amazing.

Up at Middlesborough three years ago we were welcomed to the Premiership with crazed scenes of celebration for Dean Saunders winner. That day the claret and amber travellers let the rest of the league know what we were hear to do. Make noise, and lots of it, to back our team.

Wolves should be the homecoming of this feeling. I described Liverpool at the end of the season three years ago as the Bantam Nuremberg. This is the Bantam D-Day (Nicely switching sides in the WW2 metaphor). This is our liberation.

We face tough times ahead for sure. We are in debts up to our eyeballs and even if we do get back to the Premiership we have to give much of that cash away, but we are here because we chose to be. We fought the good fight, we chose to be here.

Most obviously Gordon Gibb and the Rhodes family. The latter had the chance to walk away from Valley Parade battered and bruised but never needing to see the club again. They chose to come back. Gibb opted in.

David Wetherall and the team he represents as captain and PFA link man chose to be here. Of the sixteen players sacked fifteen of them chose to come back to pre-season training without contracts or guarantees. They chose to come back.

Nicky Law and Ian Banks could have walked away in the summer, view would have blamed them, but they chose to come back.

And when the CVA hit our doorsteps we voted for it not against it because we chose to come back.

Never before have a football club stood up and said we are not one, we have disagreements, some of us hate each other, but we will not go quietly into the goodnight. We, from the boardroom to the sponsors to the fans to the players, chose to be here.

We chose to be here.