Bradford survive

Friday 16th February.

Tomorrow sees the visit of Gillingham who are supported by my brother in law. Thankfully, he is unable to get up here for the game to avoid any family embarrassment if we lose (not that we will). There are one or two familiar faces in the Gillingham ranks, with Vince Bartram, Marcus Browning and Iffy Onoura all likely to feature in the sixteen on duty. I would imagine that Iffy will get a pretty decent reception because he was something of an enigma when he played, but exciting all the same. Marcus Browning arrived at a similar time to Marcus Stewart but never made a huge impact, and although Brian Horton kept saying that we hadn’t seen the best of Marcus Browning, we knew that we had and it wasn’t particularly good. It didn’t help that he was injury prone, but he always looked out of his depth. Bartram was one of the earlier acquisitions of Peter Jackson’s reign, but I never particularly rated him and I was pleased when Steven Harper came on loan and Bartram was allowed to return to his career in Arsenal’s reserve team.

I’m not sure quite how the defence will line up tomorrow with the only proper (?) left-sided full back currently playing in midfield. It looks as though Steve Jenkins might continue at left-back although this is not an ideal situation because he is so one footed, and looks uncomfortable when asked to play on the wrong side of the pitch. Gillingham have acquitted themselves quite well in their first-ever season in the first division having enjoyed some reasonable results, however, if we can continue as we played against Bolton (particularly in the first half) we should be able to make some headway towards the teams just above the drop zone.

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