13-day break was no excuse for Bradford City's 'poor' first-half performance against Doncaster Rovers insists Graham Alexander

After two postponements due to the weather, City returned to action on Tuesday night, but produced a very flat and poor first-half display which saw them trail at the break following Luke Molyneux’s opener just before the interval.

It was City’s first league concession since January 27.

On the restart, it took a triple substitution to change the narrative of the evening, with one of the arrivals in the 63th minute in former Rovers loan striker Tyler Smith levelling with a sweet strike from Harrison Chapman’s cross six minutes from time.

Alexander said: “Not playing for a couple of weeks could have been a potential problem but I don’t want us to take the easy option by blaming that.

"We train at a high intensity and know what’s expected of us when we go into games.

"It was a poor first half. We weren’t good at any level and we can’t afford to repeat that.

"We were just hoping to get to half-time to make a change to the mentality but unfortunately conceded a really poor goal. We gave ourselves a bit of a hole to get out of.

"We’ve been really good defensively for a long time but it was poor from our perspective.

"It’s hard for me to have a go at the team defensively because they’ve been superb. Even tonight, I don’t think Doncaster caused us a load of problems.

"But the response was good from the players. We still probably didn’t create the amount of chances that we needed to win the game but I think we certainly deserved the equaliser.

"It was a fantastic goal from Tyler. I think the point was a fair result but we obviously wanted more.”