Bradford Bulls causing alarm with repeated narrow defeats

Losing two games by one point can probably be considered careless.

But when you’ve lost three games by one point in the space of just four months, alarm bells really start to ring.

‘If only’ are the two biggest words in sport, but ‘if only’ Bulls had held on to edge out Widnes, Batley and Featherstone by the tightest of margins this season, they would be sat in second, with a healthy three-point gap to third-placed Toulouse.

Factor in a relatively kind run-in, and Bradford would have been looking odds-on to stay there and book themselves a guaranteed home semi-final in the process.

Not only that, but they would be a massive 10 points clear of York in sixth, with the possibility of booking their play-off place with five whole games to spare with a win at Doncaster this Sunday.

But for all you can point to Tom Gilmore’s experience for Widnes, Batley’s dogged late defending or a controversial penalty award to Rovers at the death at Odsal on Sunday, really Bradford have to point the finger firmly at themselves.

In six and a half years of covering Bulls for the Telegraph & Argus, I have seen them collapse more times than I care to remember, and I do still bear the scars of the 2021 return to league action at the Keepmoat Stadium, the 2022 Magic Weekend curtain-raiser at Kingston Park, as well as countless catastrophes at Odsal.

But the early signs this season were good, suggesting this was a team with more backbone and nous than previous iterations, especially the excellent back-to-back wins over Featherstone and Toulouse in April.

It had all looked so rosy for Bulls when they came out on top against Toulouse in April to make it three wins from a tricky four opening league games. (Image: Tom Pearson.)

They were immediately followed by a surprise defeat at then-strugglers York, but that could be put down to a bad day at the office given what had gone in the few weeks beforehand.

On the other hand, Bulls completely lost their bottle the following weekend against Widnes, criminally throwing away a seven-point lead with eight minutes to go.

A well-worked grubber kick for a converted Joe Lyons try, fair enough.

But Jordan Lilley’s ability to pull out a decisive drop goal is part of recent Championship lore.

Given his team-mates have witnessed and studied that at close quarters for years, how naïve did they have to be to allow Gilmore the time and space to slot over two in the space of five minutes to snatch victory?

Head coach Eamon O’Carroll pulled no punches afterwards, calling the defeat “self-sabotage”, and labelled his players as “frantic” and prone to “head explosions”.

Yet they were at it again a few weeks later, losing 21-20 against an out-of-form and out-of-confidence Batley side at Mount Pleasant.

Bulls should have seen the game out with relative ease after taking an early 12-0 lead against a side objectively weaker than them.

But with Lilley enduring a nightmare afternoon, two drop goal misses as well as a terrible late penalty attempt, the scores were all level with moments to go.

And there was still time for Lilley to fluff another one-pointer, whereas clinical Batley only needed one shot for Josh Woods to pull off what his opposing half back couldn’t.

A disbelieving O’Carroll could not believe his side’s panicked finish to proceedings as they at least looked to salvage a point, insisting “my lad’s under-12s team would have nailed that bit”.

But as the season moved into June, Bradford looked to be putting their shambolic side behind them, consistently playing well, winning four in a row before a depleted team picked up a brave draw in France.

After an expected, but battling, defeat to runaway leaders Wakefield, Bulls seemingly exorcised some demons against York at Odsal.

The Widnes wobbling and the Batley bottling looked to be rearing its ugly head again, but this time Bradford dug deep, produced a stunning late breakaway, and calmly finished off the attack to win 36-28.

Yet that feels like the blip instead, given what has transpired over the past four weeks.

Bulls backed up a second-half horror show in a defeat to Widnes with a ridiculous draw at one of the league’s weakest sides in Barrow.

They were dominating at 14-0 up, then threw away a 24-8 lead with 25 minutes to go, including the concession of one try from a BARROW goal-line drop-out that O’Carroll simply called “dumb”.

Bulls were leading by more than two converted scores on two separate occasions at Barrow earlier this month, yet somehow contrived to draw. (Image: Tom Pearson.)

As for last Sunday, Bulls rehashed some old classics in a 22-21 defeat to Featherstone.

Lilley did land his drop goal, but like his 68th minute one-pointer against Widnes, was it not too early to make that call?

Pulling it off with eight minutes left gave Bulls a long time to hold on to the most fragile of leads.

And when key winger Jorge Taufua, who has let down Bradford on more than one occasion this season with a costly yellow card, was sent to the sin-bin just after his side went in front, the crowd and O’Carroll probably knew the inevitable was coming.

Whatever the controversies surrounding the award of a last-gasp penalty to Fev were, there appeared to be a knock on from the visitors in the tackle only for Bradford to be penalised for a ball steal, Bulls’ head coach did not want to hear the excuses.

He insisted this latest narrow defeat was “self-inflicted”, citing Bulls’ appalling completion statistics and their gifting of penalties to Fev through careless errors.

It has got to the point where Bulls cannot pass these defeats off as unlucky, as they are making the same stupid decisions over and over again.

Keep this up, and there might not even be a play-off campaign to enjoy, which given how high Bradford have flown at times this season, would be the choke to end all chokes.