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It must be awful being a supporter of a club that wins, plays super football and is always at the top end of the Prem. “Won again,” is about all you can write. How dull is that?
No such worries at Burnley. I could fill pages with comments and quotes from the websites severely critical of the football being served up at Turf Moor at the Barnsley game and before.
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| A golden crust is essential |
Half my head was still in Oz thinking of swimming pools, blue skies and hot sun, trips on the ferry into Sydney, Shelly Beach, bright yellow sand, the best Chinese I’ve ever had at the Manly Phoenix, long walks round the Botanic Gardens, barbecues and eating outdoors every evening, and the memorable 5 days in Tasmania where we had a memorable dawn walk through the fields and woods, as the sun came up over the horizon and black cockatoos flew overhead and Rosellas squawked from the trees.
We’d also inaugurated the First International Manly Pie festival. From Manly’s most renowned bakery and pie-shop we ordered one each of their 5 best sellers. Part of the festival was actually carefully selecting and buying them. We made a big thing of it in the shop. The girl looked at us as if we were daft. Having made the selection, these were the crème de la crème of the pie world, each one with a thick golden pastry, none of this flaky Puff stuff. These were real pies, righteous pies, pies to look at and admire before the first succulent mouthful of pastry, chicken and mushroom; or lamb, peas and carrot; or beef and mushroom; or Mince or finally vegetable. We did mashed potato and mushy peas and gravy. We had to have some of each and the clear winner was the chicken and mushroom, lip-smackingly delicious, worthy of the accolade of 2013 Manly Grand Prix Pie du Monde.
There’s plenty of UK football on the telly over there; it seemed bizarre watching Oldham versus Everton in the FA Cup and we could have watched Bolton v Burnley if we’d known it was on. Fortunately we didn’t. It was even more bizarre seeing Emmerdale and Coronation Street especially when they’re about two years out of date. In truth Australian TV is a bit grim and News programmes stop at Australia; you’d never know the outside world existed.
Anyway, now, here we were back at the Turf. We knew there’d been a horror show against Huddersfield but your football team is in your blood and we drove over to Burnley looking forward to the game, foolishly as it turned out.
“Utter, utter tripe,” grumbled the bloke who passed us by on the stairs after the 1–1 against Barnsley. He was one of many. If it weren’t for the damp and cold that settled on us like a shroud as the game progressed, I’d have been asleep. Folk around us said that it was even worse against Huddersfield the other week. God: that must have been awful then, and must have plumbed the depths of something even worse than abysmal.
Somehow, and thank goodness, we hung on to the 1–0 win at Charlton. Those three points surely ended all worry of being sucked into the bottom end dog-fight. Three more against Barnsley would have confirmed safety.
When Austin scored the early goal against Barcelona (whoops, Barnsley, but once again we let them look like Barcelona in the second half) you might have thought ey oop Charlie is back in the saddle. Dyche is fond of horse analogies at the moment. After this game it was, “We weren’t at the races.” The other day it was “we need to get back on the horse.” Sadly they haven’t got back on a horse; it’s more of a donkey.
On my knee I had this imaginary clipboard and made pretend notes:
Football… minimal
Passing… infrequent
Entertainment… nil
Hoofball… increasing
Overall… an absolute yawnfest
Charlie… scored the goal and later missed a sitter from just a few yards.
Referee… ponderous… the movement and sharpness of a hippopotamus… missed a stonewall pen when Charlie burst through… Paterson clearly pulled back by a player already booked… nothing given. Crystal Palace have had a whopping 14 penalties this season… they’re up in the top six… the pens have helped significantly.
Grant… my man of the match, he and Trippier the only ones to come close to earning their wages.
The “players were tired.” Dyche pointed to some players who weren’t regulars but had played against Charlton and had “put a real shift in on Saturday and then maybe looked a little tired.” Aw diddums… give me strength… can you really make this lame excuse for players who earn more in a fortnight than my pension in a year? This is a club with a backroom staff responsible for analytics, sports science, diet, fitness. At the last pre-season team picture there were almost more management and backroom staff than players. And with all this expert, specialist input the players are tired!
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| Watson the Butler serves breakfast in Tasmania |
Prospects… no relegation this season… next season I’m already pondering what might happen with similar performances.
Journey from Leeds… 40 miles… does my head in… gets worse and worse… back home in horrible fog most of the way. I can do without this, I’m thinking. And all this… the damp, the cold, the fog was after the sunshine and beaches of Australia. No wonder I humphed all the way home.
Attendance… creeping ever-downwards towards the first sub 10,000 of the season; who on earth wants to travel to watch stuff like this? It’s the attendances that more than anything provide the barometer. They reflect the dwindling interest, the unwillingness to pay good money to watch mediocrity and punt-ball. People won’t pay good money to watch dull movies. Football is no different. It’s not rocket-science.
Season ticket… it’s March… renewal time… reluctantly we’ll renew ours…we buy three… but other people won’t… you read that they’re thinking twice… hear the comments around where you sit… Since Coyle jumped ship and in came Laws there has been this slow but relentless drift towards dull mediocrity… and from that comes apathy… lower attendances… less income... the cycle begins all over again and is all too obvious.
The next game… Hull City… we’ve already decided to give it a miss even though we have season tickets… got a late afternoon hospital appointment… we could still just make the game in time… but not prepared to battle with traffic to rush over to Turf Moor for more of the same. I guess the malaise we feel is part of the wider resignation around the ground at the moment.
Because the Hull game is on SKY it’s generously downgraded to a Bronze category… it’s on TV for gawd’s sake… if you want walk-ons it needs to be down to a tenner and kids for a fiver … it’s not rocket science. You’ve just seen three of the worst possible consecutive home game performances… a team that’s won just two of the last ten home games… will that persuade you to part with £26 for a game that’s on TV when money is too tight to mention?
The Blackburn game… playing like this 1–1 at best… more realistically yet another defeat.
Pessimism levels… at an all-time high… the glass… definitely more than half empty.
The squad… astonishingly the list now reaches the bottom of the page nearly…some of them will never make a regular first-team place… some of them mediocre at best…some of them you wonder on what basis they were ever signed in the first place… it’s a squad too big to be sustained… some of them kids out on loan… it’s difficult to find one flair player of the sit-up-and-watch-me variety, a player to excite, put bums on seats, a consistent match-winner.
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| Teetering on the edge |
Here’s an exercise: go down the squad list and circle the MUST-KEEP names. I found just 12 out of the 32 listed in the programme and a couple of those were border-line. It’s a squad that needs culling, reducing in size but increasing in quality. What you save on discarding a dozen lightweights, you spend on three or four real quality players and that still gives you a squad of 24. And then you look at the size of the backroom staff and ask are they really all necessary? And here’s the big question – does the Academy section really pay for itself? The club has a history over the last few seasons of producing several young lads good enough to go out on loan, and then that’s as far as they get, they just disappear and they never make it to the top level - as established first-teamers. Rodriguez was the last and that was an age ago. It’s an emotive issue. Stan T always used to question it. When the parachute payments stop and income falls is an Academy of low level status really cost-effective? We’d love one or two of these lads now out on loan to come back and step into the first team but I can’t help thinking if they were really good enough, young as they are, they’d be at least regulars on the first-team bench.
The three good things of the night… the mouth-watering Cottage Pie with our Burnley chums before the game… the final whistle… and getting back home.
24 hours after writing all this straight after the game, there was time for a bit of reflection. If Charlie hadn’t missed that sitter; if the referee had awarded the penalty we could have had a 3–0 win to talk about. But there’s that word ‘if’ again; and ‘ifs’ don’t win points.
Was I harsh? We are what we are, a small-town, small-time club that has no right to anything… It’s done brilliantly to have become a stalwart of the Championship for so long. “Punching above its weight,” the oft-repeated mantra. You could argue it’s a time of transition (yet again); key players have been missing; that Dyche has only brought one of his own players in; that we are not getting the rub of the green in some games; that in other games good play hasn’t been rewarded with goals and results; that at least the defensive play has improved and the goals going in have been reduced.
But what good is all that when in 6 games you’ve scored just three goals and at the attacking end of the pitch there’s so little to get excited about. You come back to the problems; the lack of goals over more than just 6 games; the run of poor results, the dreadful home form. And after next season no more para money. When that day comes we are back to where we were pre-Coyle, a struggling club strapped for cash. The good times… well and truly over… In my head I still have that phrase Brendan Flood said long ago (well it certainly seems an age ago) we need someone to light the blue touch-paper. It’s needed now or at least by the beginning of next season or it’s going to be a long, hard struggle.
Monday night against Hull… I’d love to write afterwards that Marney and Wallace were back and transformed things… that the donkey was converted into a horse, that they were all back in the saddle and were truly back at the races.
I watched Spurs annihilate Inter Milan; currently Spurs are the most exciting team in the Prem – and just think AVB would have come to Burnley. It’s a funny owld world. But one consolation: Back in the UK it will soon be time for the Second International Hornsea Pie Festival. Burnley supporter or not; there’s always something to look forward to.