Outlook


A moment in time


there was lyrical lament for one of the 12 founder clubs of English, and thus, world football.


attendances of fewer than 3,000 they were about to fall through the floor of the Fourth Division. They had to beat Orient and rely on


game against Huddersfield in 1924. Now, poverty-stricken on


homework, too. Burnley, founded March 1888 as a League club; the smallest town in Britain to sustain a First Division team for years on end; the first club in England to establish a training ground elsewhere to work on brilliant tacti­ cal moves; the club which had a crowd of 49,734 for a match in 1914 and a record gate of 54,775 for a cup


shone down on the old dying mill town with ironic bril­ liance. We recalled that for years it had the highest sui­ cide rate in Britain. We looked at the beautiful appointed ground with a pitch barely scarred at the end of the season and agreed how sad it all was. W e ’ d d o n e o u r


We noted that the sun


criticism of the club that became too big for its boots, posthumous debunking of Bob Lord, the small-town butcher who’d built himself a grandiose memorial and


ten where Burnley was, spilled out over the Press seats which had gathered the dust of disinterest. Some had their obituaries already written. There was coruscating


WE gathered like predatory undertakers and profes­ sional mourners, lured by the death throes of a stricken giant. Reporters who’d forgot­


IAN WOOLDRIDGE, Britain’s leading sports journalist, looks back at a moment many local people will never forget; Burn­ ley v Leyton Orient when the Clarets had to win to stay in the Football League


miracles elsewhere. I t wasn’t going to happen so let’s get it over with and catch the 5.47 back to London.


day that Burnley made fools of the ghouls.


But it was, of course, the


have been in this plight had they not been abandoned to walk alone several seasons ago but their players were too panic-stricken for cyni­ cism when they finally kicked off in front of 15,781 spectators. They were play­ ing for their own careers, let alone Burnley’s survival and the sporting term ‘sud­ den death’ takes on new shades of meaning when the last pay cheque is only 90 minutes away.


I shall never quite deter­ mine who won that match;


fuelled by 45 per cent talent — which means they played above themselves — and


the Burnley team or the crowd. The Burnley team were


wrong when Burnley and Orient came out for the 3 p.m. kick off and were immediately shooed off again by police. Thousands were s till outside the ground clamouring to get in, yell their encouragement and join in the singing of ‘You’ll Never Walk Alone.’ Burnley would never


The script started going


where. Cliff Knights, who left Burnley in 1960 to become a prosperous char­ tered engineer near Bristol, had driven up that morning


180 per cent adrenalin. The crowd, in this recently echoing concrete mauso­ leum at the foot of a damp Lancashire valley, was as passionate, pro rata, as I have ever heard. They came from every­


with his wife Betty, for what he was convinced would be a wake. John Rat- cliffe, who cut his teeth on Burnley football until he went to London University and started teaching geo­ graphy in Catford, spent £100 simply to go back and stand on the terrace and roar.


themselves in contention for promotion.


Itf n i l 11 f is s g s 'm 8 mm The first Burnley goal,


s c o r e d b y ' Ne i l Greivcock


occasion, if not a classic exhibition of football, super­ bly refereed and ferociously contested by an Orient team


behaved, as were the visit­ ing Orient fans from Lon­ don, and I have to report that if I could see matches of such passion and inten­ sity even three times a sea­ son I would cease being one of the soccer’s missing mil­ lions tomorrow. It was a classic sporting


now that Armageddon was near. They were immaculately


the crowd who were on similar pilgrimages back home, thousands who had actually stirred themselves from TV just down the road


There were hundreds in


Burnley. So began the 35 minutes that were to deter­ mine whether Burnley died, aged 99, without so much as a formal telegram from the Queen. The spectator imme­ diately in front of me, a local businessman with a tartan scarf wrapped into an extremely expensive mack­ intosh, had assured me ear­ lier that if Burnley lost the match, Burnley, as a town, would die. Hyperbole to the visiting undertakers, but in h is c a s e a p e r s o n a l understatement.


A draw was no good to


to have a heart attack every time Orient fired a shot at goal during those leaden


I thought he was going


goal that put Burnley 2-0 ahead was probably heard in Blackpool. The silence that met Orient’s goal was such that many couldn’t believe it was scored until play re-started in the centre circle.


The roar that greeted the


expense of Lincoln City. The recriminations of lunch­ time were forgotten in the tea-time euphoria.


But have the lessons been learned? Did Burnley really deserve to live? Is reprieve merely the prelude to more complacency? And is “You’ll Never Walk Alone” the a n t h em of u l t ima t e hypocrisy?


are th a t if you want a League football club locally, go and support it. Burnley did, with only a few minutes of almost a century to spare. □


The answers, I suppose,


• ‘Sport in the 80’s’, writ­ ten by Ian Wooldridge, is published by Centurion Books Ltd, 52 George Street, London, W1H 5ItF and costs £11.95


strangled me when it was over. Burnley made it at the


minutes to survival. He turned round and almost


Britton (second from left)


The second goal — and the one that clinched victory — headed home by ' Ian


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