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My football career was played at a level where it was not uncommon for one team to turn up a man short but never did I ever think I would watch Burnley play a Football League match and not select a full squad for the game.
We know we have injuries, we know we have a player out suspended, but if on the opening day of the season we are unable to name a side plus five substitutes then it does suggest that we are in a very sorry state indeed. It is difficult to believe that we could not have found one other player to fill the bench.
But we didn’t do that and had just four substitutes for a game played in temperatures more suited to an afternoon at the cricket. The weather today was certainly a good advertisement for keeping football as a winter sport despite calls in some quarters for our league to be played through the summer.
Stan gave debuts to all his four summer signings including Luke Chadwick who had only been given the all clear to play during the week following an operation on a dislocated jaw. The debutants were to have very mixed afternoons.
We set off like a house on fire and almost immediately the crowd was on its feet screaming for a penalty when Chadwick was brought down in the box only for a linesman’s flag to cancel it out with an offside decision.
It didn’t take long for referee Chris Foy to point to the spot though, in fact there were just six minutes gone when Lee Roche tugged away at Dougie Freedman and the Palace player got up to hit home under the diving body of Brian Jensen.
A goal down so early at home on the opening day of the season was not exactly what the doctor ordered but things were to get better before they got a whole lot worse and when Luke Chadwick broke clear he was brought down by Wayne Routledge and Foy immediately pointed to the spot again.
Now this was a bizarre decision. It was a foul of that there was no doubt but it was clear from any part of the ground that the foul was committed outside the box but with the assistant making no effort whatsoever to help the referee it looked as though we had got away with it.
Routledge became the first player in the division to get a red card and just as Robbie Blake was putting the ball on the spot the referee then decided to go and talk to the assistant who had made no attempt to correct him. This time he did and a free kick it was, but it made no difference and Blake hammered it in anyway for the equaliser.
Level and against ten men for 80 minutes in a heat wave we had to be favourites and when Lee Roche hit home an unstoppable debut goal on 19 minutes everything in the garden was rosy apart from that blasted Tom Hark. But that was to come back and haunt us.
Incredibly the ten men drew level and what a poor goal it was to give away. Freedman somehow got past everyone running on to an aimless ball down the Palace right and with Jensen coming out and doing neither one thing nor the other he was left to simply slide it in to an empty net for a real give away goal.
It was all level at 2-2 at half time, yes it is goals again at Turf Moor just like last season and then we were treated to the half time entertainment courtesy of the Blackburn Rovers cheerleaders. Can anyone please explain to me what the hell is going on at Turf Moor. It is bad enough having the cheerleaders every match but surely if we have to have them they should be wearing claret and blue.
We had played reasonably well at times in the first half but always looked capable of giving a goal away even against ten men but the second half was to be much worse than the first. To put it bluntly we were dreadful and hardly threatened the Palace goal. Not as though they were bothering us too much either and with a lot of niggly fouls it was hardly a spectacle.
Palace’s Shaun Derry found himself picking up a significant yellow card but it could so easily have been red after he had got away with a worse challenge just a couple of minutes earlier.
Somehow you couldn’t see a goal coming but 45 minutes without a goal is rare at Burnley but when it came what an awful goal it was. Andy Johnson got down the right and crossed and Jensen, badly at fault with the second goal, ensure a nightmare debut as he flapped appallingly at the cross and managed only to touch it on to Freedman who was totally unmarked to complete his hat trick.
Cue Tom Hark. Yes you see whoever came up with this ridiculous idea in the first place has now set us up to have the micky taken out of us every time we concede a goal. We have our own goal celebrations ruined and now have opposition fans doing a mocking Tom Hark when they score. Mind you after the way we conceded the goal.
Now we had to come from behind again and immediately another Derry foul saw him see red and we now had another 25 minutes (including the sponsored added time) to find a goal against nine men, nine men who were floundering in the heat.
We didn’t find a goal, in fact we didn’t even find one effort on goal. As Chadwick faded from the game, not surprisingly, and despite making three substitutions, we made not one single threat to get back into the game despite our two-man advantage.
And so we were condemned for the second successive year to an opening day defeat at home, conceding three goals again just as we had done against Brighton a year earlier.
There were positives albeit not many and the biggest of all was the form of Luke Chadwick who was without doubt our best player until he tired and much of our best play involved him. And his former Manchester United colleague Lee Roche recovered well from giving away that early penalty and linked up well with Chadwick down the right hand side.
But on the other side of the coin there were some poor performances. The last league game at Turf Moor provided some comical goalkeeping from NTG and Marlon but it has to be said that today was no better and Jensen must have been hoping for a better start than he had although the poor play of Branch and Gnohere in front of him could not have been much help.
Quite simply we currently look like a side capable of giving goals away, although hopefully not throwing one in. In front of them Richard Chaplow had a struggle and Paul Weller alongside him failed to give us very much at all.
The season is just one game old but there were some glum faces around as the game ended. Barry Kilby said there would be nine or ten new faces, Stan more recently said that he had not finished and there would be another five or six (after Chadwick). They both know that this has to happen and happen quickly or we could find ourselves in a very low position in the league.
Other teams have had worse results than we have today but today we were looking for some positives and left realising that this squad still needs the boost of some new players.
Teams:
Burnley: Brian Jensen, Lee Roche, Graham Branch, Arthur Gnohere, Mo Camara, Luke Chadwick, Paul Weller (Tony Grant 77), Richard Chaplow (Dean West 80), Glen Little, Robbie Blake, Alan Moore (Matt O’Neill 84). Sub not used: Paul Scott.
Crystal Palace: Matt Clarke, Matt Clark, Kit Symons (Gary Borrowdale 22), Darren Powell, Tony Popovic, Danny Butterfield, Shaun Derry, Ben Watson (Aki Riihilahti 63), Wayne Routledge, Andy Johnson, Neil Shipperley, Dougie Freedman. Subs not used: Jamie Smith, Tommy Black, Cedric Berthelin.
Referee: Chris Foy (St. Helens).