COLIN Doyle does not need predictive text on his mobile. The save button will do.

It is a regular ritual for the City goalkeeper to message his friends and family back home in Ireland after each game to let them know how he got on.

But they must be growing as tired of reading the same text as he is with sending it.

The current frustrating theme to City’s season – play well, boss games, draw – has not surprisingly left Doyle a bit lost for words when he’s messaging the folks.

“I get my mum, my dad, brothers, and other people texting me after games asking how I’ve got on,” he says with a weary smile.

“They all want to know if I’ve had much to do and I’m like, ’no not really, we should have won.’

“It’s always the same – ‘Yeah, nothing to do, couple of saves, should have won, battered them.’

“I should just save that text on my phone and send it out every Saturday night!”

For Bolton, read Fleetwood. For Fleetwood, read Bristol Rovers. For Bristol Rovers, read Gillingham …. No wonder Doyle’s missive are predictably predictive.

“You look at the games we’ve dominated lately.

“Like Bristol Rovers the other week, I don’t think I’ve played in a second half like that – oh, apart from Northampton!

“But we went to Fleetwood still confident of getting a result and we’re 1-0 up and probably cruising a bit. Maybe that’s why we switched off and got punished twice.

“But that’s football and if you don’t do things right, you get punished and we did.”

Ditto the weekend just gone as Phil Parkinson somehow left with a point on his Valley Parade return amid much gnashing of teeth in Bantams quarters.

Doyle admitted: “You look at the games we’ve just had, Bristol, Fleetwood, and Bolton. Going into them you’re thinking if we could pick up seven points that wouldn’t be bad because they are teams around us.

“Then you get a draw, but think ‘ok, we’ll get the two wins’ and then throw it away again. But that’s just the way football works.

“But if we keep doing what we do, I think we’ll pick up results between now and the end of the season.

“You want to put a run together. You want to get automatic promotion, which by the way isn’t out of the question because it’s only eight points (away).

“But we’ve got to make sure that we don’t slip out the play-offs because that’s easily done as well.

“We’ve got to look at it game-by-game, there’s no point thinking ‘we’ll win this one or that’.

“Try and get the next three points and see where that takes us.”

City also need to start keeping it clean once again. They have gone seven league games now since the last shut-out against strugglers Chesterfield on January 7.

With ten clean sheets, the Bantams still boast the second tightest defence in League One. But cracks have been appearing.

Doyle said: “I remember at the start of the season we had a run of them and you went into games not feeling that would concede.

“Let’s try and go back to being solid because we’ve not been keeping clean sheets in the last few weeks. We’ve been solid for 60 minutes and then switched off.

“But these games are gone and there’s nothing you can do now.

“We’ve just got to train hard, give everything and hopefully have enough in the next game against Port Vale to get the three points.”

Millwall, Southend and Rochdale remain hot on City’s heels in a play-off race that looks set to go right to the wire.

City could drop out of a play-off place tonight if Millwall and Southend win games in hand against Chesterfield and Peterborough.

Doyle’s message for his Bantams team-mates is clear.

“It’s just about picking points up now. It doesn’t matter how you get them.

“You look at Fleetwood who are unbeaten in 16. That’s some run they’ve put together and they are right in the mix.

“If we can somehow put a run together by going game-by-game and picking up a few wins, you don’t know where that will take you.

“It’s still a long way to go with 13 games but they do come around quickly. You can suddenly run out and find the end of the season is on top of you.”