Floodlit

It was my first proper dark night under floodlights match of the season, with Bradford City hoping to break out of their rut of drawing matches. Tonight's opponents were Fleetwood Town. Only yesterday the news was full of the low life expectancy of adult males in Fleetwood, but around ninety of them survived to make the trip across the Pennines tonight.

Due to a range of domestic and disorganisational issues I arrived at the match toward the end of the first half. "Any  score yet?," I asked as I grabbed a coffee on the way up to the stand. "Nope," came the reply (admittedly from the person serving coffee who didn't have a view of the pitch), thus setting the context for a somewhat skewed emotional engagement with the rest of the match.

You see, Fleetwood had scored in the 33rd minute, so when City scored just before half-time, I thought they'd taken a 1-0 lead. 16,500 others were cheering an equaliser.  Into the second-half, and what I thought was the comfort of a 2-0 lead, but was actually only 2-1. So I couldn't really understand quite how jittery the crowd was as Fleetwood applied a bit of pressure and City sat deep towards the end of the game. Come the final whistle, I'm still none the wiser and it's when I'm waiting for the bus home that I get on my phone to check the results in other matches and find the scoreline of the match that I'd been at to have been 2-1 rather than 2-0.

Still, a win for City, still unbeaten in the league after ten matches and back up into third in the table.