PHIL Parkinson has urged City to keep grinding out results after they hit back to take a point at Coventry.

A superb free-kick from Mark Yeates sealed a 1-1 draw at the Ricoh Arena to move the Bantams up a place to ninth.

Parkinson was critical of the Coventry pitch, which had staged a Wasps rugby union game two days earlier, and felt his side had shown battling qualities to take a point.

He said: “It was important we got something. We came for all three points but you’ve just got to keep grinding out results.

“It’s going to be like that with the way the pitches are at this stage.

“Nobody wants to know at the end of the season about how tough it was if you’re beaten. It’s get something. You don’t want to listen to sob stories about the pitches. Brendan Rogers is moaning about the pitch at Liverpool; everybody is.

“It was a very strange surface to play football on. They played rugby on it on Sunday and it looked as if nothing at all had been done on it since.

"I’d never seen anything like it. I said to Steve (Parkin) after about ten minutes ‘is that ball the right shape?’

“The lads were complaining but the ref didn’t do anything about it, which didn’t surprise me because he probably didn’t notice. But the pitch was so lively for both teams.”

Coventry, who are fighting relegation, had taken the lead just before half-time. But Parkinson was angry that referee Gary Sutton changed his mind after appearing to give a foul on Billy Clarke.

He added: “The ref made a bizarre mistake. Yes, they still had a lot to do but he gave us a free-kick, then changed his mind for a throw and the ball ends up in the back of our net ten seconds later.

“It took us a while to adapt to the pitch. I thought we did all right until ten minutes before half-time when we started to become second best a little bit.

“But the second half was brilliant. I told the lads at half-time they had to take more care with their touch on the ball and some of the football we played after that was great.

“There was only one team going to win the game in the second half.”

Yeates levelled with his fifth goal of the season – after City were complaining that the ref should have played on when Andy Halliday was fouled.

Parkinson added: “We all moaned when the ref blew but you can’t have it both ways and it was a magnificent free-kick. It was about time he got one of those.”

Andrew Davies has handed City an FA Cup scare after banging the same part of the arm that he broke at the start of the season. He was taken off at half-time.

But Parkinson was happy to see Filipe Morais come through his second game in four days unscathed.

“Morais and Hanson are getting their rhythm back in games. Normally you give those players training time before they play.

“But we’ve had to throw Fil back in and it’s a great credit to his professionalism.

“He trained 25 minutes on Thursday, another hour on Friday and has now played two games in four days. You can see he is coming back into it.”