Kevin Young

Date and Place of Birth 12th August 1961 - SUNDERLAND   Transfers to and from Burnley youth from summer 1978 to BURY - July 1984 (£25,000)   First and Last Burnley Games WREXHAM (h) - 16th April 1979 replaced by Stuart Robertson   BRENTFORD (a) - 24th September 1983 replaced by David Miller   Other Clubs TORQUAY UNITED (loan from BURNLEY), PORT VALE (loan from BURNLEY) ---------------------------------------- BURY, DOS UTRECHT

Burnley Career Stats

Profile by Tony Scholes

Some players at Burnley go on to have better careers than you might have imagined; others show real promise yet fall short of where you might have expected them to go. I think Kevin Young falls into that category.

He turned in some outstanding performances in his few years at Turf Moor but ultimately his professional career came to an end at the age of 28 and you sensed it was a talent unfulfilled.

Young arrived at Burnley as a 16-year-old in the summer of 1977. Harry Potts had scouted him previously and then, when he returned as manager, he brought in the youngster who had been turning in some impressive displays for Sunderland schoolboys.

He spent his first season at Burnley in the junior teams and ended it playing in the semi-final of the FA Youth Cup against Aston Villa. It was a team that gave us three players who went on to play regularly in the first team for a time, alongside Young were future full backs Brian Laws and Andy Wharton.

Young was the quickest to make the breakthrough. His second season saw him make a reserve team debut and then, in April 1979, a first team debut against Wrexham on the Turf. He was eventually substituted with Stuart Robertson, another debutant, coming on in his place.

Things were changing at Burnley in the 1979/80 season. After an awful start to the season we dispensed with the services of Potts who left us for the last time. Brian Miller moved up to replace him and was soon replacing some of the older players such as Peter Noble, Paul Fletcher and Steve Kindon who had all previously served the club well.

It was Young's time to step up and he did that to win a regular place in the team. The 1980/81 season saw him face a new challenge with the signing of Eric Potts from Preston, but he saw off that challenge and was very much a fixture in the side as we won promotion back to the second division in 1981/82.

He played in all but nine games that season and contributed with seven goals. Two of them were key to the success. It was the first season when three points were awarded for a win but that made little difference to us after winning just one and losing six of the first eight games.

But with news breaking that Bob Lord was standing down as chairman and was to sell the majority of his shares, we travelled to Portsmouth for the ninth game. We won 2-1 with Young scoring the opener; former youth team colleague Wharton getting a second half winner.

It kicked off a twenty game unbeaten run that led to us clinching promotion at Southend on a Friday night in May. With one more game to go we needed a point to just about ensure we'd be champions. Should we get it against Chesterfield it would leave Carlisle needing to win by seven the following night.

Simply, the game should not have been played. A torrential downpour in the early evening left the pitch, what had looked a perfect surface earlier in the day, seriously waterlogged. Had it not been the last game it would have been called off, the referee confirmed later, but he allowed it to go ahead after a delayed kick off.

We fell behind just before half time but only three minutes after the restart it was Young who scored the equaliser in what proved to be a 1-1 draw. Played through by Trevor Steven, he got down the left before hitting home and then celebrating by running through the water in front of the Longside.

Steven and Young; I can still hear the words of John Motson at Liverpool in February 1983. Playing against the champions he claimed that the pair were running the show in the Milk Cup semi-final.

It was the strangest of seasons. We were just downright awful in the league and were promptly and immediately returned to the third division, but we had two astonishing cup runs that saw us play in that semi-final and also reach the sixth round of the FA Cup.

Young's season ended with him struggling to hold down his place with Frank Casper now in charge, but things were to get worse for him in the next season, the one that proved to be his last as a Burnley player.

Ahead of the opening game at Hull, new manager John Bond told the local press that Young would never play in his team. We all turned up at Boothferry Park to see him in the number ten shirt, and he played the entire game as we lost 4-1.

He was left out of the next three games but returned for our 0-0 draw at Brentford where he was replaced by David Miller in the one substitute permitted at the time. He wouldn't play for the Clarets again although he did score a goal in a game later in the season.

Young struggled to handle the methods of the new manager and was sent out on loan to Torquay for a month in November and on his return was loaned to Port Vale for the rest of the season, becoming John Rudge's first signing having taken over as manager.

We'd written him off to the extent that he was even given permission to play against us at Vale Park in late April, and he scored a goal. Fortunately for us it mattered not with Steve Daley scoring a hat trick in a 3-2 win, our only points in the last seven games of the season.

By this time his former captain Martin Dobson was player/manager at Bury and he snapped up Young for £25,000 to join his fourth division team that was filling up with ex-Clarets including Joe Jakub, Leighton James and Terry Pashley.

A year later they swapped places with Burnley. We were relegated to the fourth division with Dobbo's team winning promotion behind Chesterfield, Blackpool and Darlington. Young had played a major part and continued to in the next season when Bury avoided the drop by three points and one place.

It brought to an end his time at Bury, both he and Jakub moving to Holland in the summer of 1986. Young went into the Eredivisie with DOS Utrecht and had three good years there with them finishing each of the seasons in mid-table.

But in the summer of 1990, still over three months from his 29th birthday, he called time on his stay in Utrecht and returned to his native North East, playing for Murton in the Northern League whilst starting a new career as a prison officer. His professional football career was over.

My early impressions of him back in the late 70s were of a player of some real talent. Playing alongside other youth team graduates in the first team such as Laws, Wharton, Vince Overson and Micky Phelan, I thought for a time he'd go on to play in the first division.

It didn't happen. His third division medal in 1982 proved to be his biggest success and at least he can look back at it knowing he scored the goal that clinched that title.