Ifs and Buts for Clarets

Last updated : 26 July 2005 By Tony Scholes

The player in question is 27 year-old midfielder Vladimir But who plays his football in Germany and is almost certainly one of the players that manager Steve Cotterill checked out when he took in some matches at the end of last season. He’s already with the Clarets and is expected to line up in Abtenau when we play PAOK Salonika this evening.

But has played for Borussia Dortmund and Freiburg and for the last two seasons he has been with Hannover and he is the first of maybe four or five trialists who will be joining the squad at their training camp this week.

He’s also played international football and has twice been capped by Russia although he holds a German passport which would make it a lot easier for the Clarets if we were to sign him. Steve Cotterill said of him, “We’ll see how he gets on but we don’t know an awful lot about him, it is just an opportunity while we are over here.”

Explaining that there could be others to follow he added, “We need to look across the waters a little bit more because everything costs more money back home. There could potentially be another four people here this week, but we don’t know at the moment and we are still trying to work on that.

“Whether they come of we don’t quite know because even to get a trialist in is a lot harder than people think. We do have to look down all the avenues we can.”

But has been added to a squad that will be without Danny Karbassiyoon who is still out injured and is now unlikely to be fit for the start of the season after suffering a hip injury last week in training.

Other than that it is a fully fit squad and Steve will select tonight from: Danny Coyne, Wayne Thomas, John McGreal, Frank Sinclair, Michael Duff, James O’Connor, Micah Hyde, Graham Branch, Ade Akinbiyi, Wade Elliott, Brian Jensen, Garreth O’Connor, Gifton Noel-Williams, Vladimir But, Kyle Lafferty, Chris McCann.

We would like to thank Burnley FC for permission to use the photograph with this article