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Date and Place of Birth 12th May 1963 - AUDLEY
Transfers to and from Burnley from OLDHAM ATHLETIC - 1st July 1998 retired - 3rd May 2001
First and Last Burnley Games BRISTOL ROVERS (h) - 8th August 1998 sub: replaced Andy Payton
WOLVERHAMPTON WANDERERS (h) - 1st January 2001 sub: replaced Lenny Johnrose
Other Clubs PORT VALE, PETERBOROUGH UTD (loan), PRESTON NORTH END, EXETER CITY, HUDDERSFIELD TOWN, BURY, OLDHAM ATHLETIC |
Burnley Career Stats
| Season | League | FA Cup | League Cup | Others | Total | |||||
| apps | gls | apps | gls | apps | gls | apps | gls | apps | gls | |
| 1998/99 | 3(12) | 1 | - | - | 2 | - | - | - | 5(12) | 1 |
| 1999/2000 | 1(30) | 2 | 0(3) | - | 0(2) | - | - | - | 1(35) | 2 |
| 2000/01 | 0(13) | - | - | - | 0(2) | - | - | - | 0(15) | - |
| Total | 4(55) | 3 | 0(3) | - | 2(4) | - | - | - | 6(62) | 3 |
Profile by Tony Scholes
When Stan Ternent became manager of Burnley we'd just escaped relegation under Chris Waddle and even that squad had been decimated with such as Gerry Harrison, Damian Matthew and Chris Vinnicombe opting to leave.
With little finance available he was only able to make two free transfers ahead of the 1998/99 season and the first of them was that of Ronnie Jepson, a player that Stan and Burnley fans knew well.
Stan had signed him for Bury two years earlier and we knew him because of his knack of scoring goals against us. Those goals included a hat trick for Preston in the Leyland DAF Trophy just days after he'd signed for them, the only goal of the game as Bury beat us in 1996 at Gigg Lane in our first league clash in fifty years, and Oldham's first in the 3-3 draw at Boundary Park at the end of the previous season.
Jepson's league career had started late. He was 25 when he signed for Port Vale from Nantwich Town in March 1989. H was there for almost three years but never really established himself as a first team regular. He didn't score in his 22 games for them but did net five times in 18 games on loan at Peterborough under the management of now BBC pundit Mark Lawrenson.
February 1991 saw him move in an £80,000 deal to Preston and just a week later he made his mark with that hat trick as they hammered us 6-1 at Deepdale in the Northern Semi-Final of the Leyland DAF Trophy.
He wasn't a regular scorer for North End and moved on in the summer of 1992 when former England World Cup star Alan Ball took him to Exeter in a £60,000 transfer. Here the goals started to go in during an 18 month stint in Devon before he made probably the key move of his career.
That move was to Huddersfield where he signed for Neil Warnock, who like Ternent was to sign him twice. He formed a formidable partnership with Andy Booth and their goals took them to promotion in Jepson's first full season at Huddersfield via a Wembley play off win against Bristol Rovers.
It was at Huddersfield where he was first nicknamed Rocket Ron and this was undoubtedly the club where he was most popular with the fans. A change of manager and a change of fortune saw both him and Booth depart with Ternent taking him to Bury in the summer of 1996.
In a season and a half he played almost fifty league games for the Shakers, with a third of them from the bench, but sensationally, in January 1998 he was sold to Oldham. It was sensational in that previous transfer fees had ranged between £40,000 and £80,000. This time he moved for a staggering £400,000 to rejoin Warnock.
It was his biggest move in terms of fee but things didn't quite work out. He played just nine times for them, scoring four goals including that one against Waddle's Burnley and just months later Ternent's moved to Burnley proved crucial.
Warnock moved from Oldham to Bury to replace Ternent with new Oldham boss Andy Ritchie deciding Jepson was surplus to requirements, and that's when Ternent stepped in to make him his first Burnley signing.
He was a substitute in our first two games of the season before getting his first start at Walsall in the fourth game of the season. He started two of the next three but in the second of those two games suffered a serious Achilles injury at Reading that ruled him out until February.
On his return he found his route the first team almost exclusively from the bench and more than once his appearances late in games brought criticism from the Turf Moor crowd. He was clearly the player that Stan trusted to see games out playing in a more defensive role.
He went on to play 59 league games for Burnley but only four of those were starts, the three early in the 1998/99 season and the fourth was the 4-3 win against Millwall as we got closer to promotion.
There were three goals two, and two were important. The first was the winner against Fulham that ensured safety in 1998/99 season and the other two came in the games against Bury in the following season. They were both stoppage time goals and the one at home won us a vital point.
Jepson's last appearance for Burnley was on New Year's Day 2001 against Wolves when he replaced Lenny Johnrose, but he was to remain at Turf Moor for a further three and a half years. He joined the coaching staff and, with Mick Docherty moving to work with the first team, became reserve team coach.
He left Turf Moor in the summer of 2004 but was soon back in football as Ternent's assistant manager at Gillingham in the second half of the 2004/05 season, again along with Docherty. He remained at the Priestfield under next manager Neal Cooper before getting the job himself in November 2005 when Cooper was dismissed after a poor start.
He was in charge at Gillingham for almost two years but resigned after they lost five of the first six games in the 2007/08 season. This was after he'd opted to stay at Gillingham previously when he looked odds on to become the new manager at Huddersfield.
His appointment would have been very popular with the Huddersfield fans and he eventually did get the chance to work there when he joined up again with Ternent and Docherty in April 2008. It proved to be short lived and by November they had all gone with the board claiming that the management team and they weren't in agreement over the direction of the club.
Ronnie Jepson had been with Stan Ternent as player and coach and he was now to do just that for Stan's nemesis Warnock. His next job was as coach under Warnock at Crystal Palace and he's worked with him ever since, moving to Queens Park Rangers and then early in 2012 to Leeds where he is currently the first team coach.
It's hard to judge his time as a player at Burnley. He was very much a player Stan Ternent wanted in his squad. There were so many occasions when he came on and did a sterling job at the end of the game and overall I'd say he was a popular player with the Turf Moor fans, except on those rare occasions when Stan's substitutions were being questioned.
Subsequent to the writing of the above profile, he departed Leeds just before the end of the 2012/13 season when Warnock resigned his position as manager. He was soon back in work, taking the role of assistant manager at Bury in the summer under Kevin Blackwell. When Blackwell was sacked in October he was placed in caretaker charge, and less than two weeks later, after one point from two games, that was extended until January 2014.
He lost his job at Bury when the club opted to appoint David Flitcroft in December 2013. He'd been in charge for ten games but only two of them had been won. Jepson was out of football until September 2014 when he reunited with Neil Warnock. Warnock had returned to Crystal Palace as manager and on 18th September appointed Jepson as his technical coach.
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