For Burnley, Saturday’s fixture away to Leicester City felt less like a football match than an intrusion upon a process of private grieving.
The actual act of playing football seemed a remote and secondary consideration when set against Leicester City’s wishes to honour the lives of the Foxes’ Chairman and the other victims of the horrific helicopter crash from two weeks ago.
Burnley were therefore assigned a role which no one at Turf Moor would have envisaged, but was one which their players, management and supporters discharged with appropriate sympathy and discretion.
Indeed, several Burnley fans took part in the pre-match march through the City; an improbable cortege, with no coffin at is head, but a nonetheless heartfelt and appropriate tribute.
Leicester City themselves are to be commended in achieving the difficult task of balancing grief with thankfulness for lives prematurely ended, but lives which touched all at the club, the city, the game of football and many more beyond.
It is comforting to note that in extremis, human beings by and large instinctively know the right thing to do.
Doubtless it is hard to assume a professional discipline under those circumstances; but after the tributes had ended, the players of both teams were obliged to do just that.
It would have been easy for Burnley to capitulate under those circumstances and given the Clarets’ recent poor form it would not have been unexpected, to their credit however they did not.
Burnley were able to repel Leicester’s early onslaught through a combination of some alert goalkeeping from Joe Hart and some sturdy defending – some of it last ditch.
At half-time a survey of the scores in the other Premier League matches revealed victory for Cardiff and leads for Huddersfield, Southampton and Newcastle. It therefore became an imperative that Burnley emerge from the game with something.
As it transpired, they did just that, keeping their goal intact to earn a point in the uniquely challenging circumstances previously described. It also transpired that Southampton and Huddersfield would surrender their leads and Crystal Palace would go on to be defeated later in the evening.
The point was therefore to be welcomed with some gratitude and given Burnley’s recent trend of conceding goals in batches of four and five, the clean sheet doubly so.
Hopefully, this will represent the genesis of an improvement in Burnley’s fortunes, as for the first time in too long a while, they looked something like their old selves.
Written by Dave Thornley who contributes regularly for Clarets Mad.