By Jason McKeown

The search for a simple verdict is often what makes managerial departures so difficult to process. We want heroes or villains. Right or wrong. Loyalty or betrayal. The reality is usually much messier than that.

Graham Alexander’s exit from Bradford City is certainly that. Some supporters are heartbroken, others furious. Some see a great manager pursuing a new opportunity, others shout judas. There is no right or wrong reaction, and nobody has the right to tell anyone else how to feel. Especially when emotions are running high.

And that is what we’re all experiencing right now. It’s a common understanding in football that no individual is ever bigger than a club, but when an influential figurehead does leave, it can certainly rock the foundations. Big-name player departures like Nahki Wells or Max Power can cause mini tremors, but there aren’t many bigger earthquakes than the exit of a manager.

I’ve supported Bradford City since 1997. Graham Alexander is the 20th different permanent manager I’ve seen (plus we’ve had three spells of Stuart McCall). Some managers I’ve liked, some I’ve loathed. They all make an impression of sorts. An individual chapter in your personal story of supporting Bradford City. But there are four managers who especially dominate my Bantams supporting history – Paul Jewell, Phil Parkinson, Stuart McCall and now Graham Alexander.

For different reasons they’ve meant more to me, but a common thread is how they’ve made me feel. Jewell, the first, delivered the two most successful seasons I’ve known following the club – promotion to the Premier League, and surviving there. Those two years began when I was 16 and ended as an 18-year-old heading off to University. It was a time in my life when football was the biggest thing bar none, and everything revolved around 3pm Saturday. Sure, it was also a period of discovering pubs, clubs and gaining a first proper girlfriend. But everything exciting about the cusp of adulthood paled in comparison to the excitement of Jewell’s gems.

Over those two seasons, I had my first taste of owning a season ticket. I travelled all over the country with mates watching away games. The nerve-jangling rise to the Premier League, and the astonishing against-all-odds survival in the top flight, was an unforgettable adventure. As I prepared to relocate to Sunderland to study Journalism for three years, and away from watching City regularly, the fact Jewell unexpectedly stood down as boss added to the unsettling feeling that my football club was leaving me behind to go on mysterious new adventures that I would only glimpse from afar.

Jewell left City because of the overbearing influence of Geoffrey Richmond, who was in a state of hubris that would lead to “six weeks of madness”. But Richmond wasn’t the only person who underappreciated the miracles his manager had performed. I was, to my shame, one of the fans at Hillsborough in 2000 who chanted at Jewell “you don’t know what you’re doing”. In those tense final few weeks of the season, I walked around with a list of Jewell grievances shared by many others, like why he’d bombed out Lee Mills, resorted to playing David Wetherall up front and wouldn’t give Isaiah Rankin a go.

The point was a lot of fans didn’t value just what a great job Jewell was doing at the time, and were soon paying the price of his deflection to Sheffield Wednesday. City nosedived under a weight of managerial and transfer ineptitude, and eventual financial collapse. As City languished in the lower leagues, Jewell was back in the Premier League repeating the same trick with Wigan. How we missed him.

Maybe that’s why I saw Jewell’s departure differently to someone who had been supporting City for 30 years before I arrived. I’d only known good. I was yet to know what bad really looked like.

Phil Parkinson took the City job 11 years after Jewell. City were in League Two, and very much facing the prospect of relegation to non-league oblivion. Parkinson turned it around and then some, delivering astonishing cup feats and year-on-year progression. He completely changed the club and gave us an amazing ride.

I was in my early 30s at that point. The 2000s hadn’t been easy. A three-year spell at University was fun, but I’d had too much fun. Whilst I soaked up £1 drink promotions and three-to-four nights out a week, studying was neglected and I emerged with a mediocre degree, little relevant experience and a competitive job search I was hopelessly ill-equipped for. At least I had found love. We got married, young. Struggled to find work and financial stability. They were some lean times.

By the time Parkinson was in his stride, we’d got decent jobs, bought our first home, and our first kid was soon on the way. And with greater financial footing, I was travelling all over the country watching City. I’d made a bunch of new mates thanks to the creation of the Skipton Bantams supporters club. We went anywhere and everywhere to follow the team.

The Parkinson years were just amazing. So many incredible moments on the pitch, all at a stage of life that gave me a front row seat. In time, that City-first mantra had to be replaced with family and I became less of the avid away-goer, but it was some ride.

Parkinson meant a lot and in WOAP’s early years, I spent many hours thrashing out articles praising him in good times and defending him over the bumps. So when he suddenly upped sticks and walked out in 2016, the shock was difficult to process.

We did not know then, as we do now, that Parkinson felt new owner Edin Rahic was someone he could not work with, and so headed to Bolton. For a time, all we had were unanswerable questions and a resentment towards Parkinson that clouded our feelings towards the guy who’d given us so much.

Parkinson’s Bolton were in the same league, going after similar players, trying to scoop the same prize we were competing for. When we went to Bolton early in the season, debating whether to applaud or boo him, and he ignored the great reception we gave him, it ruined the whole day for me. When later in the season Bolton came to Valley Parade and we raced into a 2-0 lead, I could not contain my joy at the prospect of getting one over him.

History, perspective and greater understanding of the reasons why Parkinson left have meant such ill-feelings have long disappeared. But there was a rawness then that took some time to get over. That’s why, right now, it’s hard to look at people getting angry towards Alexander and judge them too harshly. I might not share that feeling, but I can understand it.

For supporters who came of age during the Parkinson era, perhaps his departure felt every bit as seismic as Jewell’s did to me.

Stuart McCall sits somewhere slightly different in all of this. Sadly, he did not deliver the success of promotion like Jewell, Parkinson and Alexander. But his three spells in charge provided a very different emotional connection. As someone who can say I was lucky to watch Stuart McCall play for Bradford City, he means so much for his ambassador-like love for the club and the fearless way he gave everything for the cause.

He was one of our own in that sense. I’ve never wanted a Bradford City manager to succeed as much as McCall. That brought a range of sharp emotions that were deep if not always enjoyable. The highs of when Stuart succeeded were special, but my goodness the lows were something else. Like those five straight losses in Autumn 2007 that carried an end of the world feel. I’ll never forget an awful Friday night loss to Morecambe where every second of the car ride home felt like an eternity.

There was heartbreak in 2010 when McCall decided to fall on his sword and call it quits. There was anger in 2018 when Rahic unjustly sacked him. In both of these spells, the departure of McCall failed to improve the club – despite seemingly better appointments in Peter Taylor and Simon Grayson. City’s post-2018 decline after McCall was given his P45 was not dissimilar to the post-Jewell collapse.

But the third spell was sadly different. McCall looked a shadow of the manager he had been the spell before, as though the 2018 sacking from Rahic and less-than-successful spell at Scunthorpe had drained his confidence. Throw in the global pandemic with soulless behind closed doors football, and McCall looked a man robbed of his senses and strengths. The players did not seem to respond to him. But you wonder just how different it might have been had there been supporters present for games, and young, promising players like Elliot Watt could have seen the crowd’s reaction to McCall and been inspired to run through brick walls for him.

We’ll never know, and McCall’s third exit was difficult to argue. Still, it had been awful to see him go through all of that while watching from a distance through our laptops.

So how does the Alexander era compare to that? For me personally, it was special. But perhaps not as impactful as Jewell, Parkinson and McCall. That’s not to diminish his achievements. It’s more on me.

I’m now in my 40s. There’s a lot going on in life. City are a big part of that but are long way from defining it. I love going to home games, but with my kids having lost interest during the Derek Adams era and other friends having similar family juggling dilemmas, these days I tend to be a lone wolf lost in my thoughts. Then it’s off home to write them up and get on with the rest of the weekend.

I don’t quite have the fondness of the Alexander era, because my own life stage and balance of priorities are different to the times like Jewell and Parkinson. Don’t get me wrong, it has been absolutely brilliant. The entertainment, the admiration, the sense of achievement, the level of success. Fleetwood at home, and that goal, is up there with any moment supporting this club. And I was full of so much pride for the way we attacked League One last season. But it hasn’t given the same emotional highs that other managerial eras have provided.

And this is why the wide range of emotions to Alexander’s exit make a lot of sense to me. In the words of Sam Fender, I people watch. As I walk around Valley Parade on matchday I see young kids lost in the magic of Bradford City, groups of young adults revelling in the freedom that comes with going to the football, gatherings of people in their 30s, 40s and 50s enjoying football with their mates, and generations of family members enjoying the game as a group – mum and dad in their 70s, with their adult kids and maybe grandkids. All sharing in the experience together.

We all go through different life stages, and City means something different to us at different times. Your very favourite Bradford City season might be one of the worst experienced on the field, but it was something huge to you because of personal circumstances. Other, better periods of City history might mean less because other matters limited your engagement. Some of us stop going and come back. Some never return.

The beauty of supporting a football club is that there’s always another game. Always a new chapter waiting to start. When we weave our own personal history into Bradford City’s, the good times and bad times of each rarely match perfectly. And that’s likely to continue.

So I feel a sense of acceptance and warm regards watching Alexander leave. Not because I care any less than anyone else, but because I encounter Bradford City at a different stage of life than I did under Jewell, Parkinson or McCall. (I’m a boring, pragmatic, middle-aged man who lost his footballing innocence a long time ago.)

And if you’re furious that Alexander could walk out like this, you have every right to be upset. Perhaps you’ve invested a great deal in the last few years that means it feels more of a personal slight. Or maybe you’ve gone through too many chapters to want to have to start yet another. Maybe you care less than me and others. You may have found the last few years boring. That Alexander’s achievements have been overinflated. Or maybe you’re completely lost – this could be the first time you’ve ever seen a Bradford City manager deliver success.

The point is: feel what you want. Don’t let anyone tell you you’re wrong (well unless you’re this guy!) Alexander’s exit is either a disgrace, heartbreaking, or a shrug of the shoulders. Choose your own emotion and nurse it as long as you like.

It’s true this club is bigger than any one individual. But we wouldn’t love this club as much as we do if it wasn’t for the individuals that define it. Maybe that’s why some managerial departures are so difficult to process.

They’re rarely just about football. They’re about the period of our lives we associate with that person. The Saturdays spent with friends who have since drifted away. The years when football felt like the most important thing in the world. The relationships that started or ended while a particular manager stood on the touchline.

Graham Alexander leaves behind promotion, memories and a football club in a stronger position than he found it. Supporters will decide for themselves how they feel about the circumstances of his departure. But however history judges him, he’ll now take his place alongside the managers who came before him.

Another chapter in Bradford City’s story. Another chapter in ours.

Categories: Opinion

Tags: BCAFC, Graham Alexander