Graham Alexander interview: Bradford manager on riding challenges to enter League Two title hunt | Football News

“No, not really.”

Graham Alexander offers a frank response when he is asked if missing out on the Sky Bet League Two play-offs last season is driving the push for automatic promotion this term.

Bradford won six of their last seven league games in 2023/24 and finished ninth, but missed out on a top-seven place by just a single point. They were 17th in the table after a 3-0 defeat to Harrogate on March 23, 2024.

Instead, he sees it as the foundation stage of a push to end the Bantams’ six-season stay in the fourth tier of English football.

“What that did was show the potential in what we were trying to do,” Alexander tells Sky Sports.

“We went into the summer with a real positive energy that we knew we had a good squad and we could maintain the work we’d done in the last six or seven games. We had a real difficult period before that, a difficult month where results were horrendous. We drew a line in the sand and made definite decisions that we had to make to go forward.

“Those results gave us belief that we could essentially take that run into the next season.”

And that they did. Three wins and a draw in the first five took Bradford into the play-off spots in early September – until ill-timed injuries started to decimate their first-choice 11.

They won only three of the next 13 games and slipped into mid-table. Another season of mediocrity seemed a real possibility.

“Unfortunately, we sustained about six, maybe seven, injuries to that starting team in the space of about three weeks,” says Alexander.

“We lost the majority of those guys for two to three months, so there was a period of adjustment where we were trying to find the right balance in the team. We had to change the shape because we just were so short on defenders, especially – we lost our whole back three in a two-week period. We were still relatively defensively good, but we just couldn’t find that winning edge.

“Slowly, the players started to return to fitness and when we got back to a full-strength squad and had the ability to be able to impact games from the bench, that was a turning point for us.

“We tried to keep the same principles because we’d worked all summer recruiting for a certain way of playing. To go and change it all, knowing that we’d get these players back, I thought, would have destabilised us at that period.

“We had to try and get some consistency. We were hard to beat, but we just couldn’t turn those margins in our way until we had a full complement of players. Once we did that, the results turned.”

Alexander’s side got back on track with seven points from four games over the Christmas period, but they were dealt another blow – and a heavy one at that – when star striker Andy Cook was ruled out for the season after suffering an ACL injury in the 2-2 draw with Barrow on New Year’s Day.

Cook, 34, had scored 15 goals in 29 games in all competitions before his injury and 85 since joining the club from Mansfield in 2021 – the third most of any Bradford player in the club’s history.

The injury gave Alexander an important problem to solve.

“I’ve spoken before about not being a perceived one-man team,” he adds. “It’s never a one-man team, because one man can’t do anything on his own in a football match. But the perception of us was maybe that we were over-reliant on Andy Cook for goals.

“We haven’t really had, probably for maybe two or three seasons, even before my time, anyone to get even to half the level that he has scored goals. Ultimately it’s probably cost the team, because you need to score goals to win games, but if you’re over-reliant on one player, if he’s out of form or he’s injured or suspended, you’re in trouble.

“So we spent a lot of time and energy trying to find other players that can add goals from different positions and, when we lost Cooky, we were relatively confident there were other players in our squad that could not just replace him, but keep the element of scoring goals for the team.

“That’s been the case, but it’s been underpinned by the defensive strength of the team, if anything, because our defensive structure, our discipline, our will to not get beat has been a real consistent all the way through the season.

“It helps players then it takes the pressure off the amount of goals you have to score. If you’re conceding, there’s more pressure on the scoring. If you’re not conceding, there’s less stress on the forward-thinking players to take the opportunity to come their way.”

Since the turn of the year, Bradford have played 15 games in League Two, won 10 and kept nine clean sheets. Between December 14 and March 4, they won 10 games in a row at Valley Parade for the first time ever.

The automatic promotion push has been slowed by 1-0 defeats to Gillingham and Tranmere, but with nine games to go, the dip in form of former runaway leaders Walsall means they are right in the thick of the title hunt. They trail the Saddlers by just three points.

Alexander knows the fans – who have seen just one promotion and three relegations since they dropped out of the Premier League in 2000/01 – are excited about the glory that potentially lies just over a month away. He is actively encouraging that excitement.

But internally, the ‘one game at a time mantra’ will remain until the very end.

“If the fans are getting carried away, I’m not going to stop it. I want them to be excited. We want them to have hope and anticipation coming to watch their team. I don’t want to dampen any of those emotions. But nothing is done yet, nothing has been achieved.

“Everyone knows about the expectation at Bradford. It goes without saying, so we don’t have to remind the players and staff about our ambitions; it’s there for us right in front of our eyes to see.

“But we have to focus on the detail and the process of winning games of football. That’s the only thing that will get us to where we want to go. A lot of the other stuff is things that players can’t control, staff can’t control, so we don’t have to get focused on it.

“We’ve had our trials and tribulations and we’ve had our disappointments this season, none more so than losing in the Vertu Trophy semi-final in the last couple of weeks, but then we won the next four league games, which shows to me the players have built up a real good mindset of composure, focus and discipline and we’re going to have to maintain that for a considerable amount of time because there’s still nine games to go. That’s a lot of points to compete for.”

And Alexander should know. This is a man who played almost 1,000 games in his career, has managed over 500 to date and won four promotions in total. The promotion mindset is second nature to him now.

“It’s four promotions, but probably I would say 12, 13, 14 promotion chases and pushes. As a player, I think I competed in seven play-offs and as a manager, I think it’s three, maybe four as well.

“You get to learn about the peaks and troughs that come throughout a football season, how to manage them, but you can’t do it on your own and it’s why we purposely looked for players especially who’d been through this journey at clubs over their careers. You learn by your experiences, but it’s important that they don’t impact negatively on what you do in the future.”

When Alexander arrived at the club as Mark Hughes’ permanent successor in November 2023, he said “the scope here is endless”. That viewpoint has only been strengthened since.

“The potential with our backing is superb. But, with the expectations, we’ve had to try and reframe the players’ minds into enjoying that. It’s part of the reason I came to the club, because it was a big challenge.

“It still is a big challenge, but the rewards are really, really high and the emotions you feel are superb. When you win a game, the fans are just going crazy. Those feelings are fantastic to have.

“The one thing I said when we came here was that, when people talk of Bradford in League Two, they say it’s a big club – and we wanted them to say ‘big club, good team’.

“I believe we’ve managed to do that, where people are talking about the team as much as the size of the club, the support base, the good team. Then I feel we have a good chance of competing at a good level.”

Watch Bradford City play fellow League Two promotion chasers Colchester United live on Sky Sports+ (kick-off 3pm) this Saturday.