Saturday 9 August 2008
Coca-Cola League 2
Bradford City vs Notts County

A very warm welcome back to the Coral Windows Stadium for the start of the 2008/9 campaign. I hope that you have had a terrific summer and are looking forward to the new season as much as me.

Today we are delighted to be hosting Notts County, whose officials made us feel so welcome on our visit to Meadow Lane last season. I hope we can reciprocate that here this afternoon.

There is a good buzz about the place ahead of today's big kick-off, which has been helped by the arrival of several new additions to the squad over the summer months. Unfortunately, at the time of writing it would appear that niggly injuries will rule a few of those players out of contention for today's game, but hopefully they will all have cleared up within a few weeks.

I would like to take this opportunity to welcome to the club all of our new signings - namely Chris Brandon, Graeme Lee, Paul McLaren, Paul Arnison, Michael Boulding, Rory Boulding, Rhys Evans and Jon McLaughlin.

When you look at the quality of the players that Stuart has brought in this year, you will see that many of them have come from a higher division. It is testament to the persuasive powers of Stuart that he was able to explain to them the vision for what he wants to achieve at this football club and they were willing to make the step down a division in order to be a part of that. That speaks volumes of Stuart and he has the 100% backing of both Julian and myself. Stuart has managed to bring in 90% of the new faces that he had targeted at the start of the summer and I believe that this bodes well for the season that lies ahead.

We would all love to get off to a winning start here this afternoon, but there is a long campaign that lies ahead of us. A season lasts for 46 games and we won't have won the league after 10, 20 or even 30 matches. We will only be able to look at the table and judge how well we have performed once the final game has been played.

While I am optimistic that we will ultimately achieve at least a play-off place, there will inevitably be ups and downs as we go along. This is where the role played by the supporters will be so important as you rally behind the lads when things are perhaps not going so well.

Again, we are guaranteed to have the best attendances in the league with more than 10,700 season tickets sold. I would like to thank you for supporting the club in such large numbers and I am confident that we will achieve crowds of 13,000, 14,000 or perhaps even higher if things on the pitch go as we hope.

As with last season, I plan to use these notes to keep you as fully informed as possible about the various comings and goings at the football club. Today we will have several new areas of the ground open again, and these include the new 1911 Club, an executive area that doubles up as a business networking facility. We have a strictly limited number of places available in this area so if you would like to find out more about it, please get in touch with David Baldwin at the club in the near future.

Thank you again for your support and I hope it will be rewarded with the best possible outcome at the end of the season.

Enjoy the game,

Mark Lawn
Joint Chairman