Saturday 29 September 2007
Coca-Cola Football League 2
Bradford City vs Wycombe Wanderers

I would like to extend a warm welcome to Wycombe manager Paul Lambert and his team and supporters to this afternoon's game.

I know Paul well as a player from our days playing in Scotland and he followed on from me into the international side.

He was always a good, well-respected professional and had a very successful career, including winning the European Cup with Borussia Dortmund.

Paul had a go as player-manager with Livingston before coming to Wycombe last year. Some people will say he is following in Martin O'Neill's footsteps because Martin because as a manager there and I'm sure Paul will have picked up a few tips from working under him at Celtic.

He is another young manager who came into it quite early but he has now got that bit of experience behind him and is looking to make his mark.

Wycombe did superbly last season to reach the semi-finals of the Carling Cup and they've got a good squad to be right up there in the league. So we know it's going to be another tough game for us.

I hate to keep repeating it, but as a manager you always strive for consistency week after week.

It's frustrating that we can defend as well as we did against Peterborough in our last home game and then three individual errors cost us at Hereford a week later. But I won't lambast anybody for that.

Players are only human and everybody will make mistakes. Nobody goes out there deliberately to make an error.

As long as those mistakes are a rarity and it's not a continuing theme then I don't think there is a problem.

There were still positives to take out of our performance last week despite the disappointing result. I was certainly pleased with our attacking play. As well as scoring twice, we had two more goals disallowed, hit the bar and had a couple of other good chances.

That was an area that we were lacking in the previous week whereas we let ourselves down with our defending that had been so good against Peterborough. But these things happen and we're not going to get too down about it.

I would have been more upset if Hereford had played us off the park but that was not the case. We can learn from what we did wrong and make sure that the same things don't happen again.

It was three points lost but we've drawn a line through it and are now looking ahead to hopefully a more positive outcome this afternoon. We have started the season well at home and, with your backing, let's try to keep that run going.

Remember, we're all one team. Together we can be successful.

Enjoy the game and shout for the lads,

Stuart