BRADFORD CITY
‘Unbelievable.’
CHRIS KAMARA on getting to the play-offs as manager of Bradford City
‘Claret and amber kinship is the order of the day as the Dalai Lama blesses Bradford City in the run-up to the League Cup final.’
I like Bradford. It’s an interesting, vibrant and lively city. I’ve got cousins there who live in a suburb called Thornton, which is where the Brontë sisters were born. I don’t know who the sisters supported,* but unfortunately all my cousins support either Leeds or Manchester City, and there’s the problem for Bradford City. Despite having a distinct identity of its own, it seems to get overlooked in favour of the much bigger city down the road or any of the more successful clubs that lie around it on either side of the Pennines.
But if I was from there, I know for certain I would have supported them, for one reason and one reason only. They have a brilliant kit. Obviously it doesn’t quite match the full glory of claret and light blue stripes, but claret and amber runs it close. Flamboyance is not a word you would associate with Bradford, but mate, that kit is fan…cee.
Sadly, it’s not actually claret and amber any more. Or, rather it is, it’s just not called ‘claret and amber’ any more. It’s ‘burgundy and gold’ these days, for branding purposes. This time next year it will probably be ‘dragon fire and sunflower’, but it will still be lovely. Football shirt manufacturers giving fancy names to colours is one of those small things that really irritate me.† A greeny-brown away kit is still horrible whether you call it ‘taupe’ or not.
No one seems to know why claret and amber were chosen. Rather strangely, the team was formed in 1903 when Manningham Rugby League club, in danger of going bankrupt, tried one last desperate throw of the dice and became a football club instead, and the Football League, keen to get a football interloper into rugby country, bunged them straight into the Second Division before they had ever played a game.
It may be, as one theory goes, that Manningham wore claret and amber and the newly named Bradford City adopted them as a guilty tribute after they changed their name. Another theory has it that the colours represent the colours of wine and beer, to reflect the chosen beverage of its middle-class owners and its working-class fans. Or there’s my favourite theory: the local sport shop only had one kit in stock when the new club came knocking.
I’m not the only one who likes those colours either, the Dalai Lama wears them a lot, although I’m fairly certain there’s a spiritual reason for that, unless he saw Bradford on the telly in Tibet one day and thought ‘that’s the team for me’. He visited Leeds in 2012 and was apparently given a Bradford shirt, which is why he was gracious enough to send a message of support for that League Cup final a year later, when they became the first fourth-tier team ever to reach a Wembley final. Sadly, the blessing didn’t help: they lost 5-0. Never mind, there’s always the next life. And they do at least have one major trophy.
In 1911, when the colour combination was claret with a sort of massive yellow collar, they won the FA Cup, collecting a trophy that had only just been made in the city of … Bradford. Since then, nothing much.
Well, I say nothing much. Unfortunately, every football fan knows the name Bradford City for one terrible, terrible reason; and it happened on what should have been a rare day of celebration, as just before the kick-off of their game against Lincoln City on 11 May 1985, they had been presented with the trophy for winning the Fourth Division title.
Around 42 minutes later, the referee abandoned the game with smoke visible in the Main Stand. Moments later the stand was engulfed in flames. Fifty-four Bradford City fans and two Lincoln City fans were killed. The official cause was given as a carelessly discarded cigarette. In truth, it was caused by fans having to sit in a dilapidated wooden stand beneath which was the accumulated litter of many seasons, including a newspaper from 1968. It was the worst football stadium disaster since 65 fans were killed on the cramped stairs of Ibrox during an Old Firm derby.
It’s difficult to explain to younger fans how different English football was in those days. There was no glamour, no wall-to-wall worldwide coverage. Just physical football, played on grass-free pitches in shabby stadiums. Of course, we didn’t know that then. It was our game and we loved it.
At the time, football and its fans were under siege from the government, the police and the tabloid press. Every single one of us was a working-class hooligan or lout, going to games intent only on confrontation with each other. And we didn’t pay much to get in, so why bother giving us fancy facilities like a roof, or a toilet with a door?
Of course, there were hooligans. We hated them, not only for what they did but for what they did to the reputation of the rest of us. Those hooligans were a tiny minority but attitudes to them rubbed off on us. You often heard the phrase ‘if people behave like animals you treat them like animals’. But as I say, I was there, and my theory is that if you treat people like animals, even the nicest of them will sometimes behave like one.
‘Football specials’, like the one that took us to Blackburn, were trains chartered by fans to get to away games. Normally, it was a whole train, and if you were lucky, you got one that didn’t look like it had been taken out of the shed for the first time since the Blitz. When around a hundred of us made the long and arduous trip to Wrexham, our ‘special’ was one carriage attached to a normal, scheduled train. The door to our carriage was padlocked in case we disturbed the normal, scheduled passengers. We changed trains at Wolverhampton, which simply involved shunting us on to another one, padlock and all, while we were prevented from leaving the train by a line of policemen. If some of us were seen pissing out of a train window, it wasn’t because we were hooligans, it was because we’d been padlocked into a train with no toilet for five hours.
The dilapidated stand at Bradford was the result of years of neglect. We’d always put up with poor conditions because we put up with poor conditions. But some good did come out of it. Well, not good exactly, but at least the beginnings of a glimmer of good, of a change of attitude, of a dawning realisation that people shouldn’t be fucking dying at football matches.
Condolences and financial donations came from around the world. Even the Pope made a statement, and I mention that because (a) it’s good, and (b) I like the idea that a chapter in this book contains the Pope and the Dalai Lama.
Lord Chief Justice Popplewell (who chaired the official enquiry) was not a football fan. He did recommend some safety changes be made, but he concluded that the best way to save football fans from harm was to make it more difficult to actually go to games by making them all carry membership cards. And he could have ordered, as safety experts who testified recommended, that all the fences that ringed football pitches be removed. Instead, he ordered they should have wider access gates as a means of escape in case of emergency. It was a decision that had fatal consequences four year later in the overcrowded pens at Hillsborough.
Some of you may think that it is flippant to start this chapter with a light-hearted look at a football shirt and end it with the death of 56 people. But here’s why. Like you, I love football nostalgia. I will discuss old games, old players, old kits, old TV shows and old dogs on the pitch with great delight. But one thing we should always remember is that for all the exuberant joy of football, it could also be tragically shit.
Why You Shouldn’t Support Them
■ In the circumstances, I’ll sit this one out.