As Mr January, he’s the face of the new year on many bedroom walls.

Simon Ramsden is the first image of the clever Friends of Bradford City calendar, reading the T&A’s match report in his dressing gown.

Ramsden was thankful that the pictures had been shot in an arty black and white – sparing the fans from seeing his embarrassment at wearing pink.

But perhaps the choice of colour – if not his own – was fitting given the mood he has been in since returning to the first-team fold.

As Phil Parkinson puts it, he’s in a much better place now than a couple of months ago. Or pretty much any time in the past year and a half of injury torment.

That makes it all the crueller that Ramsden now faces up to six more weeks back in that treatment room that he probably knows better than his own lounge.

Having returned so effortlessly to the City back four, he is on the sidelines once more. Not back to square one, far from it, but frustratingly out of reach of Parkinson’s selections plans for the next half-dozen matches.

In Ramsden’s first game out, City conceded more goals in 11 second-half minutes than they had in the previous five league outings when he had played.

It’s too simplistic – and wrong – to suggest the sudden and out-of- character implosion on planet Don Valley was down to the absence of a number two shirt.

But a defence that had taken on Fort Knox proportions in recent weeks is poorer for lacking the calming influence of the right back.

And what grates City the most is that Ramsden’s latest setback was not his fault. He was the victim of a clumsy, clattering lunge from Shrewsbury’s Joe Jacobson in the mad-cap final minutes last Saturday.

The fact that Jacobson only saw yellow for that challenge, so soon after David Syers was shown red for his sliding tackle on Nicky Wroe just added salt to the wound.

While Dean Moraheb’s strange refereeing left a bad taste at the time, the knock-on effect of losing Ramsden will prove greater.

Statistics can prove anything but in Ramsden’s case, the figures are overwhelming proof that City are a far stronger side for his presence.

In eight appearances this season, beginning with that dramatic JPT victory at Sheffield United, Ramsden is yet to appear on a losing side.

Even his one-off game midway through his injury marathon last term saw a clean sheet and home win over promotion-bound Wycombe.

In his last 14 matches, admittedly spread across 22 months, City have lost only once – at Shrewsbury on the opening day of 2010/2011. Ramsden has not tasted home defeat since Bury pinched the points in Stuart McCall’s farewell.

No wonder, through all those dark times when many feared whether he would ever return, the club always stuck by him.

Different managers have the same opinion on one of the stalwarts of the Valley Parade dressing room. When fit, he is rightly one of the first names on the teamsheet.

City fans want to see him for more than a month on the calendar. In an ideal world, he will be out there every week.