Best of Three
The relative merits of Luton, Blackpool & Burnley…
I met the Marketing Director of Luton Airport a few years ago at a conference. Over dinner, she lamented that even 40 years after the Campari adverts featuring Lorraine Chase (the demographic of London Clarets being what it is, I don’t think this cultural touchstone needs further explanation), she faced an uphill battle in repositioning ‘London Luton’ as a convenient, civilised alternative to Gatwick & Heathrow.
Until two weeks ago, my only experience of Luton was indeed the airport. It’s no more or less ghastly than any other regional airport, serving the short-haul stag & hen party and budget weekend hordes. But after my visit to Kenilworth Road recently, I now realise the home of easyJet is the leitmotif of the city or town it finds itself on the edge of: it’s what Versailles is to Paris, the Parthenon to Athens, the Golden Gate Bridge to San Francisco and so on.
If Luton ever make it into the Premier League, they will surely have to do something about the ground. Seriously lop-sided with a two-tier, pre-fab stand along one touchline with space for all of a hundred people, the visitors’ end is even more of a joke. To get in, you file through the backyards of dilapidated terrace houses before ascending rickety-looking stairs and taking your (unallocated) seat to enjoy a view, largely obscured by some early 20th-century carpentry and ironmongery. The best that can be said it is well-suited for its environs and a fitting metaphor for the match itself: a grim, uninspired affair leavened only by a correctly-awarded penalty, calmly and confidently taken by Barnes to grab all three points.
The next week, against Huddersfield at Turf Moor, was a night and day difference as the visitors shredded from the outset. As Neil Warnock commented later: “This (Burnley) is the best team I’ve seen in the last twenty-five years”. The assumption was that he was talking specifically about the Championship but the verbatim quote on the BBC website did not include this qualifier. Whatever, it was mightily impressive and - for what it’s worth - it’s the best Burnley performance I’ve seen, stretching back to the ‘Team of the Seventies’ under Jimmy Adamson and admittedly sporadic following since.
While Guðmundsson rightly bagged the Man of the Match honour for his all-round performance and contribution in setting up three of the goals, there were simply no weak links in this group. The pace and artistry were mesmerising with some blink-and-you-missed-it ball-control techniques emerging that create a vacuum of space in a congested final-third, almost at will. On the odd occasion things went pear-shaped when in control, the recovery, aggression and tenacity to win back possession were always in evidence. Similarly impressive is the selflessness in front of goal, the most notable example of which was Guðmundsson’s willingness to make his 99% chance of scoring a 100% certainty by ushering in Roberts to finish the job.
A week later, and after a bracing motorcycle journey through the Peak District and quick blat up the M6, another dilapidated town beckons. I have fond memories of Blackpool: from day trips from Burnley with grandparents in the 1970’s through to getting thrown out of The Gynn pub as a gobby, ‘Child of Thatcher’ student one December night in the 80’s. My pal was amazed (as he is to this day) I made it out without being dismembered by the incandescent locals. Writing this, I remember the restorative walk the afternoon afterwards and taking the moody, studenty photo below.
Blackpool North Pier, 4 December 1984
These days, Blackpool South - the location of the Bloomfield Road stadium - has the lowest life expectancy in the country, a stunning fifty-five for women and fifty-four for men and a walk down the seafront in search of something for lunch that did not look outright life-threatening seems to explain one root cause of this grim statistic.
It’s difficult to work out exactly what has gone wrong for Blackpool and how to fix it. Go five miles down the coast to Lytham and a Saturday night out there feels like home (I live in the part of Essex featured in TOWIE), complete with Cuprinoled women with huge white teeth, clacking around, imbibing industrial quantities of Prosecco, squired by blokes with artfully curated stubble piloting BMW M3’s or blacked-out Range Rovers.
Maybe they’ll all drug-dealers and spend their loot in Lytham having plied their trade up the road. It certainly looks like that with so many miserable-looking folk wandering aimlessly about, the really unfortunate ones having a ticket for the grisly, attritional encounter of March 3rd.
Given Blackpool are in the relegation mire along with Huddersfield and Wigan clubs with 32 points - and six points adrift of Cardiff - it looks like further misery is about to be heaped on the town. So they can hardly be blamed for simply containing Burnley and emerging with a scrappy point. The stats. tell the story: 78% possession, three-and-a-half times as many passes and five on-target attempts, all without the decisiveness of the previous Saturday.
So how does this leave Burnley equipped for the rigours of the Premiership they are almost sure to endure? I’ve just watched the highlight of the Wigan match and the vim of Huddersfield has returned after the dismal afternoon on the Fylde coast a week ago. With fourteen points required from a potential 36, only the most pessimistic amongst us could be contemplating another year in the Championship and - horror of horrors - further trips to Luton and Blackpool.
Taking a simplistic look at the component parts, it all seems to be in place: Pace? Tick. Skill? Tick. Attitude? Double tick. Height? Mmmm…that could be a problem. At Luton & Blackpool, it was very apparent that this is not a tall side and both these opponents had a ballistic capability that Burnley struggled against. A quick Google search suggests the average height of the squad is 1.78cm (5’ 10” in old money) compared to 182.6cm (6’ as near as dammit) in the Premiership. This difference is likely to be critical in aerial battles and assuming there is a corresponding increase in mass (we have to assume Premiership pace will be equal or faster), this squad could find themselves shoved around a fair bit. The bolshy physicality of the Dyche years is what kept them in the top-tier for seven seasons and somehow - between now and August 12 - this characteristic needs to re-instate itself, but hopefully not at the expense of the artistry that Vincent Kompany has bought.