Glory Days
2018 begins after a week when five points slipped through Burnley’s hands, a consequence of an ultra-determined Manchester United side, a fortunate Huddersfield and a frankly jammy Liverpool. Hopes of a resilient bounce-back to form are counter-balanced by the nagging doubt of a return to old ways and the risk of a slow, agonising slide down the table towards the swamps of the relegation zone.
For the second season in succession, the fixtures have fallen such that after the ignominy of a 1-0 defeat at Crystal Palace that I really can’t remember anything about, it’s not until 10th March at West Ham on a rare spring day do I take the Tube down to Stratford and make my way across the Olympic Park.
In the intervening time, gravity has been well and truly defied with points ground out of various attritional encounters in biting cold on frozen earth. After a confidence-boosting home win against Everton, Burnley have clung onto seventh place and emerge blinking into the East London sunshine at the London Stadium.
West Ham’s co-owner, David Sullivan, lives in a 25,000 square foot house on the edge of Epping Forest, reputably the largest private house built in England since the Second World War. According to the Daily Mail’s scholarly article entitled ‘The House that Porn Built’, he resides there with his wife and two sons. With a little over 6,000 square feet each to themselves, they must be tripping over one another all the time…
Similarly, the London Stadium looks a little too big for its tenants but I do think the supporters need to give it more of a chance. It’s slap bang in the middle of their ‘manor’ but the wrong shape to watch football, given the pitch is sited with each corner touching the perimeter of a running track. Spectators are therefore a bit too remote from the action but it’s a big step up from Upton Park, a cramped cattle shed in one of the most nondescript parts of a particularly shabby bit of Inner London.
But elements of the Hammers fan base are not always the most rational or understanding folk… To celebrate the last-ever game at Upton Park some of their numbers pelted the visiting Manchester United coach with bits of masonry and street furniture. Asked what he would miss most about their old home, Sullivan growled: “The larverly femlee admusfear…” I rest my case…
And this atmosphere was very much in evidence on March 10. On the hour, a move starting with a precision pass from Lowton up the right flank that has become his stock-in-trade, was followed by some neat counter-intuitive possession play from Wood. His lay-off to Barnes, approaching at full tilt, ending with the ball crashing into the top corner from about 20 yards. A half-hearted pitch invasion followed with the tragicomic spectacle of a few half-witted, woefully out-of-condition Cockneys gallumphing their way across the turf watched by nearly two dozen bemused, elite athletes who looked like a different species by comparison. Two more goals and similar incidents followed ending with Barnes’ best move of the afternoon as he brought down one of the marauders with a deft professional foul.
I’m off on holiday the day after so my Batchelor Fridge offers nothing but Batch Brew Gin (distilled on Coal Clough Lane in Burnley), Fever Tree tonic and Leffe Blonde, so I stop off in Loughton on the way home for a pint and something to eat. ‘The Staging Post’ is full of terrifying men who make Sean Dyche look and sound like Julian Clary. I’m deep in enemy territory here as The Hammers and Spurs monopolise affections in these parts and the events of the afternoon down the road in Stratford dominate conversation. I sense dark mutterings about liberties being taken and unwritten laws being transgressed. But true to form for this very friendly neck of Epping Forest, a stranger clocks my Burnley cycling shirt and gestures from across the bar that he will buy my pint. I nod my thanks and we have a brief chat where he offers his congratulations for a victory I clearly had no part in other than to witness. Time and time again, I’m surprised at the comradeship and goodwill of opposing supporters. It’s just as it should be, of course, but always takes me by surprise.
David Walsh, Chief Sports Reporter on The Sunday Times published an intriguing piece a couple of weeks before. Denied the opportunity to serve the game he loves as a result of his wagering peccadilloes, the saintly Joey Barton has stepped into the void left by Dr. Anthony Clare and his Radio 4 ‘On the Couch’ series with a podcast entitled ‘The Edge’. I download it for the journey from Munich to Obergurgl, high in the alps on the border with Italy.
Sporting a chunky roll-top jumper, tweed jacket and academic-looking spectacles, Joey is now unravelling the human condition by interviewing notable figures from sport and politics on what it takes to win. His first patient is Sean Dyche and it’s fascinating, so much so that Walsh had devoted his entire column to it. All characteristics you would expect from Dyche are present and correct: articulate, forthright, loyal, dignified & stoic. But there a few surprises in store too as Joey unearths Dyche’s faith in psychometric profiling, his willingness to delegate authority and use of a mild form of hypnotherapy to ‘reset’ the team using the same music at the end of the half-time break as when the team exit the dressing room before kick-off. He also displays unexpected empathy and uncanny self-awareness, evident in that he realises he can sound a bit fierce. Having worked out which players don’t respond well to his particular bark, he chooses to work through others to make sure ‘The Information’ they need is delivered and understood.
The programme is so good that when I stop at the Angath Rastplatz area on the Inntal Autobahn to pay the €10 toll to use Austria’s fabulous roads for eight days, I download Episode 2 featuring Clarets uber-fan Alastair Campbell and again it’s excellent. The three and a half hour journey passes in no time, the setting sun gilding the peaks of the snow-capped mountains of the Southern Tyrol as floodlights illuminate the various kirchen und schlösser that dot the foothills.
Joey instinctively realises that he, himself, is not the focus of the programme (Jonathan Ross, Chris Evans and innumerable others, please take note…) and manages to draw out pearls of wisdom from both of his first two guests that I have deployed to good effect on Civvy Street. In particular, Campbell’s observation that only when he saw yawns amongst the hacks in the press room at No. 10 did he realise New Labour’s message was reaching the outer perimeter of those they sought to influence. This has now become my company’s mantra. Resistance is futile…
Three weeks later, we visit ‘The Hawthorns’, bucolic-sounding home to the beleaguered West Bromwich Albion. I hold my hand up to having made some fairly unchristian noises about West Brom before without having actually visited the place. Now I have, my previously uninformed prejudices are vindicated and then some…
Unless I knew better, I would assume ‘Smethwick End’ to be a medical condition, affecting gentleman in the autumn of their years. But as a devotee of the original, peerless ’Porridge’ TV series, I know that ‘Smethwick' is where Godber, Fletch’s cellmate and West Brom fan lived in a tower block before robbing his neighbour and subsequent incarceration. I’m not sure which end - Smethwick or otherwise - visitors are penned into but getting into the stadium forces a walking tour of the neighbourhood and it’s all a bit grim, a desolate, endless, low-rise industrial estate with no civic locus. Within a 9-iron of a sludgy M5 motorway, a lone Starbucks and BP petrol station are the only evidence that it’s not the outskirts of Chernobyl we’ve stumbled into. But at least we won and what a win it was…
After the way he felled a West Ham supporter a few weeks ago, I‘m starting to suspect Ashley Barnes really wanted to be a ballet dancer when he was growing up. The gravity-defying leap, the mid-air re-positioning and the perfect connection of instep to ball opened the scoring and paved the way to success, albeit with a fractious last 20 minutes. Barne’s artistry could only really be appreciated later on Match of the Day when all the pundits agreed it was one of the goals of the season. Strange why it did not feature as a contender for Goal of the Month but then again, he is a Burnley player and so a damn good ignoring was always on the cards.
So that’s now four straight wins on the trot and having exorcised the ‘Burnley can’t win in London’ demon on successive visits to the capital (at Selhurst Park last season and then, on that magical day at Stamford Bridge in August), it’s time to bang the nails in the coffin of another myth, if you’ll forgive the multiple mixed metaphor.
The five-straight wins streak started at home to Everton, having recovered from a goal deficit at halftime to claim all three points, the first such success in the Dyche era and the first for Burnley in the Premiership since 2010. It was also the first win since early December. On 7th April, Burnley both came from behind and won in London. Well, Watford is just inside the M25 so that sort of counts. It was far from a vintage performance but an unseemly six-yard box scramble and goal-line technology gave the model-professional that is Jack Cork a well-deserved winning goal. He might not be the flashiest player but the consistency, diligence and ability to make everything look easy are there in every performance. It was probably one of Sean Dyche’s easier decisions to make him Captain for the injured Mee as Cork is truly a player who leads by example.
As the season wore on, the depth of the squad is beginning to become apparent. Notwithstanding that some combination of Barnes, Brady, Mee, Dafour, Tarkowski and Heaton being absent in the latter matches, the points continue to accumulate. That said, it is difficult to see how Heaton could have had a better season than Nick Pope and begs the question as to how the club will handle this embarrassment of goalkeeping riches. The town really isn’t big enough for both of them. A shame, but they both deserve the limelight and so a move for one must be on the cards.
To have six key players out of action and Cork as the second reserve skipper is an indication of the strength and depth that the club now has. These qualities are enough to salvage a point at Stoke but not even a full-strength starting line-up, on the first day of the season having all undergone blood transfusions the night before, could have lived with Arsenal for what was Arsene Wenger’s last match at the Emirates.
The pace, artistry, organisation and skill levels on display were mesmerising. Once the inevitable became clear, the only sensible course of action was to soak up the May sunshine and enjoy the spectacle for what it was.
So it all seems a bit too calm and controlled as I enjoy a splendid motorcycle ride over the Snake Pass on 13 May. Burnley will finish seventh regardless of the result against Bournemouth this afternoon and this has seemed likely for the last month or more. Over the season, triumphs and disaster have been dealt with in a manner Kipling would approve of and there is a sense that a meticulous plan has been worked through meticulously, with a scientifically predictable result.
And now, a dream end to the season is within sight as at halftime having controlled the game, Burnley go in with a deserved one-goal lead. The high-farce that followed was a throwback to earlier eras… The circus-animal trickery to try and play the ball out of defence rather than a good hoik upfield contributed to the equaliser. Worse was to come. In the last minute of added time someone appeared to have tied Long’s bootlaces together and he simply fell-over gifting possession to Dafoe who combined with Wilson to finish with ease. Interviewed later, Sean Dyche did his best to conceal his frustration as so he should, given the superb season the club has had.
But where now? Firmly established and universally admired as one of the more cerebral managers in the Premiership, Dyce must be trying to reconcile pragmatic adherence to a tried & tested formula with the oft-quoted teaching in ‘The Leopard’. Chronicling the changes in Sicilian life and society during the Risorgimento, Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa’s 1958 novel is best known for the aphorism: “If we want things to stay as they are, things will have to change.”
Of course, there will be change and there will be a plan and it’s no doubt being worked right now. It’s just we don’t know what it is until it starts to unfurl over the coming months. For the time being though, there’s an open road and Europe beckons. Summer is here and the time is right for rolling down the windows, letting the sun in and just enjoying the moment.
P.S. I went on a charity cycle ride in Laos, South East Asia in January this year in aid of Mines Advisory Group (www.maginternational.org). A full write up of the experience can be found at www.i-movo.com/mag-charity-cycle-ride-in-laos-2018/ for anyone interested in this part of the road or the cause. The ride ended in the beautiful city of Luang Prebon where our hotel overlooked the Laos national football stadium. It’s a world away from the Premiership…