David Wetherall believes Bradford City will stay up if they can maintain the level of performance they showed in yesterday's West Yorkshire derby.
Leeds United ran out 2-1 winners thanks to a double strike from Michael Bridges to leave City two points behind fourth-from-bottom Derby with ten games to play.
However, Wetherall believes City proved to a national audience yesterday that they have what it takes to win their battle for Premiership survival.
He said: "We must keep that level of performance up, and then hopefully we will get the breaks. I firmly believe that level of performance will be enough.
"We are not disappointed at all with our performance, just the scoreline. People might say Leeds didn't play well, but you can only play as well as you are allowed to play. I felt we got about them and didn't let them get their passing game going. We are playing better now than we have all season, so that has to give us optimism. What we must do is cut out the silly mistakes."
The influential defender admitted that two instances of poor defending had cost City the points in what was an entertaining contest for the Sky TV cameras.
However, he says City must not dwell on that and instead should take heart from a performance which deserved to earn at least a point against his former club.
He said: "If we can play like that, then we will get a good number of points between now and the end of the season.
"We did not have time to do any training with Neville Southall due to Matt (Clarke) being injured so late. It doesn't help shaking things up, but I thought we did all right and had certainly done enough to get a point. Neville had a couple of shots to deal with late on when we had five players up front, but on the balance of play we definitely deserved something."
City's scorer Peter Beagrie also insists City have plenty of fight left to lift themselves clear of the relegation zone. He said: "We haven't given up the ghost, there's plenty of fighting spirit, but Leeds also showed the battling qualities they need as well.
"We need at least 12 or 14 more (points), we've got to drag teams back to us and we've got important home games coming up, so it is in our hands."
Converted for the new archive on 30 June 2000. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.
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