Bradford City’s ‘Aguero moment’ tops everything I’ve seen as a football fan
VALLEY PARADE – It is 4.56pm on a bright afternoon in Bradford and Valley Parade is overwhelmed by a deep, aching sense of desperation.
A 46-game League Two season, the sunny optimism of August, the trudge through deep winter before spring breaks and the promotion bolters break free, really is not meant to come down to this.
But here we are: the final automatic promotion place has been wrestled back by Walsall, a team supposedly in the midst of an implosion for the ages. The Saddlers have frittered away a double digit lead, they are meant to be dead. But they are winning at Crewe Alexandra and every one of the 24,033 people at Bradford City knows exactly what that means.
“It’s not happening,” the bloke behind me wails. And it is hard to argue: Bradfordian nerves have been wound taut all day, each misplaced pass and over-thought touch cranking the tension up another notch.
And then it happens. A long ball is hoisted into the penalty area, nodded back by a Fleetwood Town defender into the path of substitute George Lapslie. His shot is heading comfortably into the arms of goalkeeper Jay Lynch but it brushes off the feet of Antoni Sarcevic and begins spinning towards the goalline. From the top of Valley Parade’s towering Kop it feels like the clocks stop as a wrong-footed Lynch sets off to try and change destiny.
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Bradford City snatch promotion to League One with a last-gasp winner!
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Too late and in that moment there is a reminder of why you invest so much in this sport, why you would throw your lot in with a club so starved of tangible success that it held an open-top bus parade through the city to mark finishing 17th in the Premier League 25 years ago.
It is absolute bedlam after the goal. Sarcevic wheels into the corner, buried under a sea of claret and amber bodies as an earthquake of euphoria detonates in the stands. Around me in block J, everyone is hugging, emitting the kind of high-pitched roars that crescendo into screams.
People are appearing around me from rows back. I grab a bloke I had never met before and bear hug him, locked for a minute in disbelief at what has happened. Nobody, thankfully, has a selfie stick – people are just drinking in every last drop of the moment in real-time, bouncing around uncontrollably.
The goal sparked a pitch invasion, too. It is ill-advised – Bradford will likely face a sizeable EFL fine – but adds to the sense of chaos. Thick red pyro smoke fills the air and for a second I have a horrible fear, muscle memory from watching too much top-flight football, that the goal might not have stood. But this is the EFL and it is a VAR-free zone.
On social media a few are complaining that it was offside, buying into the cult of hair’s breadth calls or toenails being beyond the last man. Really? And make all of that for nothing?
When the smoke clears and the fans get off the pitch, there is a minute to play.
You wonder how the Walsall fans feel in the away end at Gresty Road. For weeks they had been involved in a cycle of self-destruction with Bradford, each taking their turn to agonisingly miss chances to capitalise on the other’s misfortune.
Now they actually win for the first time since February and they have to sit through arguably the most perfect, cinematic conclusion to a season in the 139 years that Valley Parade has been hosting sport.
And there is poignancy here. It is 40 years since, on another day when Bradford gathered here to celebrate promotion, tragedy struck when fire engulfed a stadium and claimed 56 lives. Before every final home game – whatever has happened in the season – Valley Parade falls silent to remember and in the stands the scars from that dreadful day are born.
A row down, a middle-aged man puffs out his cheeks when the team come out before the game to You’ll Never Walk Alone. During the minute’s silence his adult sons locked arms with him either side. One tenderly strokes the side of his head. You can only imagine what they have been through.
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Bradford do not wear the tragedy conspicuously. A few years ago there was a trend to start applauding on the 56th minute of every game to commemorate those who lost their lives but it lost momentum.
They remember quietly here, with dignity and stoicism and manager Graham Alexander – one of the game’s good guys – said he had been seeing the number 56 “everywhere for the last month”.
“I just didn’t want to let the fans down,” he said in an emotional interview on local radio afterwards.
On the drive to the ground Alexander had been ‘running through scenarios for what might happen”. This, he admitted, was right at the intersection of best and worst case scenarios.
But in truth it was more than that: a claret and amber-flecked Sergio Aguero moment that will forever be part of the club’s history, an “I was there” moment that will be shared through the generations.
When the dust had finally settled and fans began to float towards the exits, I got chatting to a lady who pulled a picture out of her bag. It was of her mum and dad, sitting together with wide smiles on their faces. She pointed to the seat he had sat in for nearly 50 years. “That was for him,” she said, her eyes moistening.
