By Jason McKeown

Home tickets for Bradford City’s West Yorkshire derby with Huddersfield Town on Saturday 13 September are already on sale. According to many Town fans on social media, that makes us tinpot, small time and proves we’re treating this game as our quote unquote cup final.

And who knows, maybe all that’s true. Perhaps claret and amber enthusiasm for this fixture is greater than blue and white. It might be that Huddersfield supporters consider themselves above such trifling matters as bragging rights. And that a trip to Valley Parade is just another featureless away day in a division they’re still upset to have fallen back into.

After all, it’s been a while hasn’t it? The last competitive Town-City meeting was 12 years ago in the first round of the League Cup. The last league meeting a whopping 18 years ago. That’s enough time for you to have had a baby who’s now old enough to legally drink a pint. Back in 2007, George Bush and Tony Blair were the leaders of the free world. Since the Terriers and Bantams last battled it out for three points, we’ve witnessed seven changes of prime minister and 36 Marvel films.

During those 18 years, both clubs travelled in very different directions. Operated in very different spheres. It caused an unbalanced relationship that never sat well for us. We gave them Nahki Wells, and they gave us Chris Atkinson (yeah, I couldn’t remember him either!) For City, the opposite worlds we lived in included us slumming at the bottom, feeding off Town scraps like Sean Scannell and Luca Colville (any news, Simon?). So yes, it obviously means more to us for the West Yorkshire derby to be back on the fixture list. To be equals. It’s either a sign of our progress, or a measure of Town’s decline. Either way, bring on 13 September.

What we also didn’t really have 18 years ago was social media. So the biting and sniping between supporter bases that we’re seeing play out on X, BlueSky and Facebook this summer is all a bit new, all a bit different. Some of it is nasty, some of it is rude (no animal comments on this site please!) and other bits of it are utterly humourless.

The last bit very much fits in with the wider football social media discourse of many people attempting to police other people’s emotions and regulate fun. From getting upset if a team or set of supporters celebrates a victory too much (Arsenal get a lot of attention here), to trying to lecture an opposition set of fans over how excited they are allowed to be about an upcoming match. Hence the “it’s your cup final” jibe, which is dispensed as an insult, decorated with crying with laughter face emojis. We’re not supposed to look forward to 13 September, because if you do it’s our cup final. And we shouldn’t admit to that.

But do you know what? It is our cup final. Well, not in the sense of a true cup final. Which of course we at Bradford City have actually experienced (ha ha! What a diss at Huddersfield fans! Quick, someone high five me!) But it is a cup final in a sense that this is the most exciting fixture of the season. It’s the game – to use the cliché – you looked for first when the fixtures were published last month. If we could choose one home match that City definitely win this season, I think we’re all voting for this one. It’s going to be such an exciting occasion – and we should not feel silly about thinking that.

So tickets are on sale early, because what City fan wants to miss this one? And as Town fans laugh and mock, they might want to be slightly concerned about how those sales go. The last time Huddersfield came to Valley Parade, we were never close to filling our ground. So we gave them the entire Midland Road stand and evicted City season ticket holders from their regular seat in this area. If home tickets sell well for this game, there will be no need to do something similar. In fact, we might be able to go all Grant McCann and ensure Huddersfield have as low of an away allocation as the rules allow. All of which means it might not be easy for Town fans to get a ticket for this game.

Let’s hope so, because by doing so we get to the true heart of what this fixture used to be about. Absolute pettiness. Small-time thinking. Grudge-holding. And I think we should all be down for that! This is two clubs that in the 1990s and early 2000s had a genuinely hatred for each other that stretched beyond supporters and into the two dressing rooms, dugouts and boardrooms. Stuart McCall once observed that even a game of tiddlywinks between City and Huddersfield would greatly matter. He wasn’t wrong.

Once this was a friendly rivalry, apparently. For example, Town let City play some of their games at Huddersfield’s Leeds Road stadium as Valley Parade was rebuilt after the fire, which the players were said to have preferred over performing at Odsal. But when in 1988 Huddersfield, bottom of the table and about to be relegated, went to Valley Parade and defeated a City side that was in with a great shout of automatic promotion to the top flight, the seeds of bitterness began to be sowed.

The revolution of football in the 1990s – where thanks to the likes of Fever Pitch and the advent of the Premier League, being a football fan became trendy – altered much of the UK thinking of local rivalries. It became an obligation to have a derby foe to hate, and City and Huddersfield neatly fitted the bill for each other. Geoffrey Richmond, ever the pioneer thinker, saw value in this too. In order to be the hero in any story, you need a villain to overcome. And Richmond relished doing all he could to paint Huddersfield as our nemesis.

And so during the mid-90s, the two clubs got into an arms race over who could make it first to the Premier League. And this was where the pettiness really began. There were genuine bust ups about reciprocal ticket concessions that saw Geoffrey Richmond and his Town counterpart having heated arguments on live radio. It sounds ridiculous of course – what a time to be alive! You’ve got to love such triviality being taken so seriously.

During this period, Huddersfield also adopted one of City’s heroes of the 80s – Peter Jackson – as one of their own. Jackson’s second spell playing for the Bantams did not go well and he ended up at Huddersfield harbouring bitterness that sat well with his new public. Jackson played to the gallery by stating “cut me and I will always bleed blue and white”. Okay, Peter. He was assured pantomime villain status on subsequent trips to Valley Parade as the opposition manager, and he couldn’t hide his glee celebrating whenever Town scored at BD8. He once went full Mourinho down the touchline, before Mourinho down the touchline was a thing.

But City got the last laugh, and then some. In 1999 they won the arms race by sealing promotion to the Premier League – despite losing home and away to Huddersfield along the way. On the day that the City open top bus paraded the players around Bradford in celebration, Town sacked Jackson. Coincidence? Unlikely.

And whilst City dined at the Premier League top table, Town attempted to follow them with a highly ambitious summer recruitment that included hiring Steve Bruce as manager. Only the money wasn’t there, they had to sell top scorer Marcus Stewart mid-season to promotion rivals Ipswich. They missed out on promotion (Ipswich went up). And a year later they got relegated. Terrific entertainment, lads.

Of course, it was about more than pettiness and one-upmanship. The needle on the pitch turned sour in 1997 when Town defender Kevin Gray produced what the late Jimmy Hill would describe as “one of the worst tackles I have ever seen”, breaking City record signing Gordon Watson’s leg in five places, sidelining him for 18 months. Gray only got a yellow card, but the quest for justice ultimately saw City and Watson take Town and Gray to court. City won. Town paid damages. It all got very serious. Very bitter.

Just after the court case, City played Huddersfield away – the first of the double defeats to their rivals during the 1998/99 promotion year – and when Watson came on as sub, home fans booed him and chanted how he only had one leg.

It was obviously nasty and unpleasant. But that’s what the derby was on both sides could be. On that same day, me and my friends were followed around Huddersfield town centre by a gang of 20 Town fans after we had naively worn City colours. We had to dodge lobbed bottles as we tried to get home, trapped in the gloom of losing a fixture that meant so much. During the match itself, City had taken an early lead and nearby Town fans started rioting as they tried to get near us. This was a proper football rivalry with an edge. A shared loathing. The only thing we could agree on was a mutual hatred for Leeds United – the big brother in all of this, annoyingly believing they’re above any of this local rivalry nonsense.

After a five-year gap, in 2004/05 City and Town shared a division again – League One, like now – and the pettiness and needle resumed, helped by the fact Jackson was back in the Huddersfield dug out, still bleeding blue and white. City defeated Town home and away in that first season, but the 2-0 Valley Parade victory in March 2005 was our last non-penalty shootout success over our neighbours. It’s also the only time Town have lost in their last seven visits to our beloved home.

In 2005/06 Town won 2-1 at Valley Parade before a forgettable 0-0 in Kirklees. And that brings us to 2006/07 and the last time we shared a division. City would be relegated that year, losing 2-0 to Town during the run-in – one of the most pathetic Bantams performances I’ve ever seen. Our only chance that day was a Steven Schumacher shot that flew so far over the bar, the ball is currently sharing the same orbit in Space as Alan Sheehan’s York penalty.

Earlier in that season came Town’s last visit to these parts. A 1-0 success for the visitors, who at the time were middling in mid-table whilst the Bantams had started well and sat fourth in the league. And looking back on that October 2006 West Yorkshire derby, the pettiness and aggro levels are reassuringly familiar.

Dean Windass has gone into that game on the brink of notching his 200th career goal. Apparently he was wearing a special t-shirt under his City top that he would have unveiled had he scored. Just read the post-match words of Town’s Danny Adams, dripping with petty-mindedness. “We’d heard Dean had a special 200 T-shirt on under his top to show their fans – well he can keep wearing it for another week now!” Love it, Danny. No notes!

Adams himself had been red-carded after his channelled his inner Kevin Gray to wipe out City’s young loanee Nathan Doyle. Town fans produced the only reasonable reaction in such circumstances, they blamed Doyle as he lay injured on the floor. The City right back spent the rest of the game getting booed and skipping bottles flung towards him. “I just thought I’d take the stick away from Deano (Dean Windass) for a change and get a bit myself – it’s nice for him to have a break!” joked Doyle after the game.

Seven players were booked that day. Town’s 4-1-4-1 formation spoiled City’s chance to go second, and the home side’s late attempts to equalise were thwarted when a City fan randomly ran onto the pitch and spent a good couple of minutes racing about with his arms outstretched, as though he was pretending to be an aeroplane. This game was the City-Town rivalry in a neat microcosm. Ugliness, pettiness and very little in the way of actual football. And it meant the absolute world.

And it’s why, 18 years on, the return of City-Town to the schedule is a so-called cup final moment. For both teams, but especially City, there haven’t been big games like this to get worked up about in recent years. League Two was largely a much of muchness, with opposition sides rarely offering any fixture an extra edge. Having Harrogate as your local derby was a source of shame (especially as they kept deservedly beating us!) You looked elsewhere around English football and enjoy TV watching the derby spectacles of Man United-Man City, Liverpool-Everton, Burnley-Blackburn and Newcastle-Sunderland, wishing we had a game as intense and where the bragging rights meant as much. This season, we get our own version.

It’s been so long that we’ve got thousands of City and Town fans who won’t have experienced this derby before. Who won’t fully understand what it means to those of us who remember the fierce clashes. And in this social media driven world of policing other people’s fun, it can be understandable to look down on those of us rubbing our hands over this fixture. But you know, pettiness is what this game is all about.

So let’s have those tiresome debates about which club is bigger, who has the best history, and which animals need to be safely locked away when the other lot come to town. This is small-minded, silly and futile existence where no one ultimately gets to have the last laugh, and nothing is ever decided. A game where winning and bragging rights are everything. Until next time.

It is something we have missed. And maybe we will wake up on Sunday 14 September – the sound of Town fans chanting “2-0, in your cup final!” still ringing in our ears – and conclude that it wasn’t actually a thing we should have pined for. That it was all very ugly and unpleasant, and that actively hating your neighbour isn’t healthy. But equally, we could be waking up that Sunday morning with a level of happiness that no regular league victory (outside the Fleetwood game) has given us in a long time, feeling gleeful at the thought of bumping into people we know in our lives who support the other lot.

Because football is supposed to mean something – and the outcome of the City-Town derby almost certainly will.

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Categories: Opinion

Tags: BCAFC