MORE than 11,000 spectators were inside Valley Parade on that strange and terrible afternoon 30 years ago. City had already secured the Third Division Championship on April 23 - St George's Day - by thrashing Cambridge United 4-0 away.

Bobby Campbell scored two of the goals as Bradford listened expectantly to Tony Delahunty's commentary on Pennine Radio. The T&A, which was a broadsheet paper in those days, announced the victory on its front page and back pages.

The match against Lincoln City was a mere footballing formality. Its chief significance was the opportunity it offered fans of seeing their young team parade the trophy round the pitch before the game.

It was a day of saying thank you to City's players, directors and management team of former England and Wales internationals Trevor Cherry and Terry Yorath. And for them to thank the fans for their forbearance when times were hard and enthusiastic support when times were sweeter.

The state of Valley Parade reflected the state of Bradford at large. Recession at the end of the 1970s had decimated light engineering and industrial companies. Unemployment had shot up in excess of 30,000 and was particularly hard on the opportunities of the young.

In the autumn of 1984 Bradford Council's Policy unit produced and published a document called District Trends: The Changing Face of Bradford, describing the metropolitan district's short-comings in health, education, housing, the local economy, poverty and welfare, race and women's equality and new technology.

In November that year the BBC2's current affairs programme Newsnight went to town on this report, describing Bradford as one of the poorest, unhealthiest and desperate cities in all Britain.

In short, Bradford didn't have a lot to feel good about. City's fans had developed a gallows humour, chanting at opposing fans in the end facing the Kop, "This is the Valley, the Valley of death." They meant the death of the opposition's hope of victory.

During a run of bad results, not having much to hope for, they chanted it at themselves. They had actually witnessed the death of Bradford City in the summer of 1983. The club founded in 1908 collapsed with debts of nearly £400,000, which seems a small amount these days when top Premiership players get almost that as a weekly wage.

But in 32 years ago it did for the old club. A new club, Bradford City 1983, was formed. City's fans had raised £43,000. Local businessmen Jack Tordoff and Stafford Heginbotham pitched in and bought 150,000 shares for about £40,000. These two sums got the new club started.

The following season saw the acquisition of players such as Greg Abbott, John Hendrie and John Hawley and the establishment of Stuart McCall and Peter Jackson. City had both a strong defence and a goal-scoring attack.

The expectation of an end-of-season thumping win was an added incentive to occasional supporters that blustery May afternoon. The football did not live up to their hopes. It was a drab game, notable mainly for unusual occurrences among sections of the crowd in the Midland Road cowshed and on the Kop.

Younger fans with green-painted faces pushed through the Midland Road towards the Kop. What looked like a smoke bomb was thrown from the Kop end nearest the main stand. A little old man in a flat cap and his much burlier son stood at their usual places on the halfway line in the Midland Road and as usual baited the linesman.

Up until about four or five minutes before half-time the match looked like being a damp squib in front of television cameras on the Midland Road stand. But the whisp of smoke coming up from the Kop end of the main stand turned into a bush of fire with bright red flames at its heart.

A breeze swept down from Manningham Lane which hurled the flames up into the roof of the stand. Then, with everyone looking on in disbelief, the flames fizzed along the roof edge of the stand like a trail of ignited gunpowder.

Above Valley Parade a pillar of black smoke rose high into the sky, reminiscent of the photograph of the beach at Dunkirk in the spring of 1940 when British and French armies waited to be rescued.

That evening, as T&A reporters returned to their typewriters in the old newsroom, the telephones started ringing, bringing news of something utterly unexpected: the numbers of dead.

City's fans on the Kop never used that chant again.