Saturday 19 April 2008
Coca-Cola Football League 2
Bradford City vs Grimsby Town

Welcome to the Coral Windows Stadium for this afternoon's visit of Grimsby Town. I would like to extend a warm welcome to the directors, officials, players and supporters who have travelled over from Grimsby for today's game.

This will be my last set of programme notes for the season because, as many of you will have noticed, myself and Julian have been taking turns contributing to this column. Therefore, I would like to take this opportunity to thank you all again for your tremendous support this season on behalf of myself, Julian and all of the players. The backing that you have given the team both here at the Coral Windows Stadium and on the road has been terrific.

I am very frustrated, as I am sure you are, by the way this season has gone and I will be doing my utmost to ensure that we enjoy more success next year. Planning for the new campaign does not start now or indeed at the end of this season - it is something that we have been preparing for over the past few weeks. Hopefully we can put a plan together which can make us more successful and give us the best possible chance of securing a play-off place at least come the end of next season.

We should bear in mind that since the beginning of January Stuart has done a terrific job in turning round the results and if we had performed to that level across the season we would have achieved a play-off birth this year with the current squad. I do believe that the squad does need strengthening to ensure that we achieve our aims next season. However, we should not throw the baby out with the bath water. Instead, there needs to be a strategic pruning of the squad which - to continue the gardening analogy - will allow us to grow back stronger next season.

As you will probably have heard by now, we will be holding a fans' forum at the club with myself, Stuart and David Baldwin on Tuesday 29 April at 7.00pm.

This will be a great opportunity for you supporters to ask us questions on a whole variety of topics affecting the football club and, as always, we will be as honest and informative as possible. I hope to see as many of you there as possible and look forward to hearing what you have to say.

Finally, I would like to remind you that we have the TL Dallas Bradford End back in use for home supporters again next season and I would urge fans to take up the opportunity to book their season tickets in that stand. I firmly believe this will help to ensure that the support we have in the ground is even more vociferous than it has been this season.

I will finish by again saying thanks to you all for your backing this year. As we head into the summer, please remember that everything that myself and Julian do at this football club we do as fans and we always do what we believe is in the best interests of Bradford City.

Enjoy the game, have a great summer and I look forward to seeing you back here for the first game of the new season.

Mark Lawn
Joint Chairman