The post-match comments probably damned Arsene Wenger deepest. "I cannot fault the effort from my players... I don't think there's any psychological problem with the players... I don't think it's a lack of quality."
He added: "You feel embarrassed when you don't give everything." That he would not accept the shame of his worst result in 16 years as Arsenal manager was telling. The professor had chosen the rhetoric of Comical Ali and William Joyce.
This time he could not say that he had not seen the incident. Crouching in his oversized club-issue puffa jacket at Valley Parade, his anxiety was clear from very early on. Having thrown the kitchen sink at the League Cup by dropping only three players from his weekend Premier League selection, it soon became apparent that this would be no night of superiority breeding serenity.
Only Jack Wilshere should have left West Yorkshire with any pride intact, though he will still probably have felt the pain deepest. Colleagues with hundreds of international caps between them should have been shamed by the 20-year-old's desire and application.
Their names also reflect the desertion of Wenger's previously hallowed transfer market nous. Lukas Podolski has over 100 caps but is short of technique, Per Mertesacker seemingly has the pace and turning circle of Helmut Kohl.
The once-envied eye for a player looks gone. In the past, the likes of Lauren, Kolo Toure, Mathieu Flamini, Sylvain Wiltord and even Thierry Henry arrived as a certain type of player only to convert into something far more effective but Gervinho is never going to be a central striker. He looks as ill-fitting to Arsenal as his hairstyle does to his head. The retention of the similarly ludicrously coiffed Marouane Chamakh can only be a sign of a bereavement of options.
The sheer number of ex-Arsenal players currently playing with more decorated clubs franks how much of Wenger's judgement was once spot on. That they no longer play for Arsenal is the story of a club where footballing ambitions have diminished while financial commitments are being met.
Wenger is now frontman for a club where fourth is treated as a trophy but in his early years at Arsenal, his was the team to beat to win Premier League and FA Cup. From 1998-2004, they were never out of the top two, and champions three times. The 2005 FA Cup that has since proved their last trophy was Wenger's fourth in seven years. No manager had so dominated the competition in its history.
The departure of Patrick Vieira in the summer of 2005 is often painted as the beginning of the end, but it probably lies a year beyond that. In their last competitive game as a club that called Highbury home, the Champions League final was lost, and unluckily too, in Paris. From there, the Emirates at Ashburton Grove became home, and footballing success was mortgaged against an admirable architecture of steel and glass.
By then, Wenger was looking to his next generation, but few of them remain at the club. Finance stymied ambition, and from there, chances of silverware, and Wenger's fledglings looked elsewhere. Ashley Cole, Robin Van Persie, Samir Nasri, Cesc Fabregas, even Emmanuel Adebayor are denied to the manager who made their name. He has not been allowed to offer the wages to keep them, or bring in the quality of player to make them more disposed to stay.
The club's ten-year-old business plan has been overtaken by the petrodollars that wash through the likes of PSG, Chelsea and Manchester City but Wenger is happy to play the part of parsimonious prince of Arsenal. There are few stories of him going cap-in-hand to the board to ask for more. By accepting the pact of moving to the Emirates, he has been placed in an unassailable position that looks all too comfortable.
After a defeat like that to Bradford, who within Arsenal's hall of power is to pick up the phone and say, "Arsene, a word, please?"
A power vacuum means there is a paucity of contenders to stand up to Wenger, a result of a complicated ownership structure, where one major shareholder is an absentee landlord based in Colorado and the other, who actually does have the key to a petrodollar fortune, has not been invited to the board.
Wenger, without the guidance of his friend David Dein, who left the club in exasperation at a crippling financial model, has become ever more powerful at a time when his footballing powers are deserting him. What may still protect Wenger against the sacking that many expect at the end of the season is that it would take a complete overhaul of the club's structures to replace him. The idea of Wenger being moved upstairs looks unworkable in the light of his need to be in control. Arsenal could find themselves in a similar situation to that of Manchester United with Matt Busby, though at least Busby assumed his new desk job with the European Cup a recent memory.
At Bradford, as Arsenal struggled to get back into the game against a team in the lowest fully professional division of English football, it became clear that for all their control and possession, they could not choose their destiny. The same has become true of Arsene Wenger at Arsenal.