Bookends

I always enjoy going to the King Power Stadium despite its daft name. Even before the tragedy of the helicopter crash that killed Leicester’s chairman two years ago, the dignified response of all Burnley supporters (and it was ‘all’; even pundits that usually gives us a damn good ignoring commented on it), and the appreciation from the club for the respect we showed, I always feel both clubs have a certain kinship. Maybe it’s the relative obscurity juxtaposed with name recognition: most people know of both places but have never ventured there and would struggle to find them on a map, let alone find a reason to visit.

But both represent a slightly grimy, beige-tinted view of a country that once was: a persistent nostalgia for rickets, outside toilets and a slow slide into the oblivion of obscurity that has a hypnotic quality for certain demographics. They also represent The Dream: that a modest team can triumph against the fortunes of variegated provenance that fuel the soulless leviathans of the Premiership.

Anyhow, the Foxes triumph in the 2015/16 season is the dream that followers of Burnley and our ilk allow ourselves once in a while. And even five seasons on - but now with money to spend, - Leicester still look like a ‘proper’ team of old. A sprinkling of foreign exotica over a bedrock of solid, domestic quality; a terse manager with an impenetrable regional accent and a pantomime villain of a centre forward in Jamie Vardy. Giving as good as he gets from opposing supporters, he might look like the bloke with a dog on a string, camped out in the doorway of what used to be your local Woolworths, but he always shows real mettle in his performance. And he did here, putting Burnley ahead with an own goal before recovering to score a further two in the even scoreline.

What a splendid afternoon it was. Tragedy, farce, excitement, disappointment, all played out under a late-September sun. And that rarest of things: a completely fair result. Yes, I know three points rather than one - grubbed in the dying moments from a Chris Wood disallowed goal - would be very welcome right now but it seems like the team was clawing its way out of early season trouble and a cause for some optimism.

It was the same at Stamford Bridge a few weeks later and at home to Palace the week after that. Against Chelsea, faced with mesmerising speed, talent and movement off the ball, all Burnley could do was dig in and hope that this team would lower their guard for a second. And it really was only a few seconds, a barely perceptible relaxation was just enough for Vydra to prompt the satisfying spectacle of Chelsea’s wan, thin-lipped, joyless Teuton of a manager wailing at the injustice of it all on MotD later.

‘Thrilling’, ‘End-to-end’ and ‘Goal of the Season’ are three turns of phrase rarely deployed to describe Clarets and Glaziers soirées but this one earned all three. Again, a real ding-dong of an encounter. While I have mixed feelings about seeing Tarkowski flatten Zaha at every opportunity and denying us the spectacle of his stellar talent, it undoubtedly contributed to the final result, albeit not as directly as Monsieur Cornet’s perfect volley that shared the spoils. Even in slow motion, the power of this is astonishing. Vicente Guaita only needed to move any part of his vast frame to stop it but the pace was simply too much; barely a blink of the eye from 10 yards out.

Has anyone measured the speed of this or any similar goals? I remember Peter Lorimer’s 70 MPH dead ball capability was supposedly at the limits of what human beings - if one can refer to the Leeds United squad from the Don Revie era as this - are capable of, but the ballistic capability of seemingly all todays’ Premiership players looks to be on another plane.

And so against this backdrop of gutsy, determined and sometimes quite classy performances, I was looking forward to the key match at St. James Park when the simple maths of a victory over an adjacent relegation contender would lift us clear of this grisly attrition of draws and losses towards the comfortable pastures of mid-table.

I was also keen to make amends for my last visit to Newcastle in dining terms. A couple of years ago, my company were invited to make a presentation to the board of a client headquartered in Newcastle and asked if we would like to go for “a drink” at the end of the day. By 15:30, our hosts seemed keen to bring things to a close and by four o’clock, we were trundling into the city centre on a shabby Metro train. We each chipped in twenty-quid as a whip but by five o’clock that had all gone and was duly replenished. Twice. As eight beckoned, I enquired what the dining plans for the evening were…

“Thees fookin’ jessie wanz t’ga fur summit ta it!” exclaimed our host with thinly disguised hilarity, practically exhaling his pint as he did. Denied the tactical, mid-session kebab my colleague dived out for and wolfed down without telling me, I was hunkered down on the train the next morning muttering various, unchristian sentiments about the locals and how all the violent, drunken genes of the Viking invaders seem to have ended up in the north-east leaving all the liberal, docile DNA back in those nice Scandi countries.

No, this time would be different, and so as part of the trip I planned to visit and review for London Clarets, Hjem in Wall, near Hexham. Boasting a newly-minted Michelin star, Hjem has gained a reputation as the ‘Geordie Noma’, given the similarities with that Copenhagen shrine to Northen European epicurism and pioneers of the foraging trend.

Bearing in mind its relative inaccessibility and comedically high prices (£225 a head including wine pairing, payable in advance if you please…), I thought I would have the pick of the tables when bookings opened for November and December at 09:00 on 01 October. But by 09:05, everything had gone bar the odd midweek lunchtime. I’m sorry, but this is bloody ridiculous and I feel a bit silly to have got swept up in what seems to have become a national obsession now the county is off the leash (almost). Anyhow, I’m not sitting with sweaty index finger poised over a mouse, drooling over gastro porn at an hour when decent folk are already at work any more so won’t be troubling readers with my musings on anywhere that can’t be booked just a week or two in advance.

Instead, I remembered reading about Barrio Comeda, a Tacos restaurant formerly of Newcastle but re-opened in Durham so we went there. £89.65 for two including a generous Apple Margherita, eight zingy, ultra-fresh Tacos, two carafes of fairly insipid wine wine but sparkly service is much more like it, and had us lurching into the crisp Durham air again by nine o’clock. Google Maps located the excellent Victoria Inn up the street for a couple of bracing local brews before finishing the evening off at the Half Moon and retiring to the City Hotel for the night, farting exuberantly like a pair of contented drayhorses in our modest, shared room.

Most memorable of the match was the stadium itself. Although there are five Premiership grounds with greater capacity, apart from the mightily unimpressive Anfield, these are all modern, efficient and hide their bulk well. St. James Park is simply a colossus - the kind of thing an Eastern European dictator might build, but the performance of both teams was in stark contrast. From the lofty perch we were assigned at the Leazes End, both teams were reduced to ants, scurrying hopelessly in every direction. I realise ants’ colonies might be highly organised but it never looks like that to the untrained eye and these teams didn’t either.

One scrappy goal, the result of a rare Nick Pope mistake, a biting north-east wind, being taunted by a couple of spotty, malnourished foot soldiers of the Toon Army on the hike back to the car made this a day to forget. Honestly, you think they’d just won the European Championship. As that benign and pacific commentator, Rod Liddle, pointed out gleefully in today’s Sunday Times, Newcastle United are the third most successful major north eastern team in the last fifty years. Out of three…

I had planned to end this article with observations on the Leicester match at Turf Moor but the ravages of Covid, injuries and a small ageing squad took its toll. Like the Everton match scheduled for Boxing Day, this fixture is now kicked down the road somewhere. There’s a multiple pile-up of fixtures looming with the squad weakened further following the departure of Chris Wood. His talent for scoring scrappy goals (and quite a lot of them…) seems to have faded recently and £25 million back on an outlay of ten or so with five years of sterling service thrown in is a deal not to be sniffed at. Now, if the scouts can just find another couple of Maxwell Cornets with the cash…

But as Tony intoned grimly in an early episode of ‘The Sopranos’: “Things are trending downwards…”. The balance of probabilities is that Championship football and a period of rebuilding beckons. The reality is that a club with Burnley’s financial model can’t compete in a transfer market, grossly inflated by the presence of sovereign wealth funds sprouted from geological good fortune typified by Newcastle.

There’s dignity in Burnley’s position and I do hope that the new owners don’t go in for the usual pointless scapegoating and blood-letting of management and staff that moneymen are justly famed for. After all, it’s been a great seven seasons (at least five more than anyone had predicted) and may well become known as one of Burnley Football Club’s Golden Ages. But that’s the problem with the Golden Ages. It’s difficult to know when you’re in one:

“A time it was, and what a time it was, it was; a time of innocence; a time of confidences”

Old Friends/Bookends lyric by Paul Simon © Universal Music Publishing Group