The story of this one starts on Friday night, at a dinner for the various London-based supporters' clubs of non-London teams. It proved to be a night of considerable intoxication for the good number of London Clarets' members present.
Fast forward a mere handful of hours to six o'clock the following morning. Time to get up and go to the game! Oh bugger. Four of us had decided that we had constitutions sufficiently robust to handle both events. By seven o'clock, when it was time to leave home, I realised I had been wrong. Back to bed was the only sensible option. So I left. King's Cross at 7.30 is a grim place at the best of times, and this wasn't. You could tell who the four were. We shambled, we shuffled, we clutched bottles of fluids, and we reconstructed forensically piece by piece the events of the night before. The journey north was subdued, but needed sleep remained elusive. The train was late, but it's virtually impossible to miss the connection to Burnley, as there isn't one - there's a huge gap between our train from London arriving and our train to Burnley departing. I normally choose to spend this time waiting around for eleven o'clock and a quick livener before the cross-Pennine train, but for the first time ever I forsook the warm embrace of the Prince of Wales in favour of coffee and water.
Ah well, by and by the Ibuprofen and the anti-acid tablets and the coffee and the water worked their magic. By the time we got to Burnley I could look that Ministry of Ale pint square in the eye and master it. A very pleasant lunch was spent in the company of various members of the Burnley e-mail group, and by kick-off I'd managed a respectable 3.4 litres of beer, which in a way is kind of worrying.
The match offered an excellent opportunity to catch up on sleep. It was a sunny day, warm for March and with no hint of rain - although people assured me I was still in Burnley - and the temptation to stretch out and nod off was huge. Although the line-up showed promise, with our most creative players on show, the entertainment on offer was utter dross. I didn't see our narrow midweek defeat against Leicester, but those who did spoke of a much better performance. If so, this was a step backwards. We looked uninterested, a team going through the motions. Welcome to the first pre-season friendly.
The team played as though they had my hangover. I knew the reasons why I could barely walk, never mind run: too much booze, not enough sleep, overworking and poor personal health habits. What were their excuses?
In some ways, I suppose I can understand the players struggling for motivation. Regardless of public protestations about there still being games left to play and if we win them all we can do it, we all know that the competitive season has ended. We will go neither up nor down, and so there is little left to play for. (Do you get money according to your final position? If so, then at least there should be that to encourage us.) But if we're talking about money, what about the 28 Euros I paid to get into this kickabout in the sun? Effort is the minimum I expect from every Burnley player and every Burnley side, and we didn't get it.
Supporters need to be motivated to keep coming to games for the rest of the season, and of course, need to be given reasons to renew season tickets. The Upper Harry Potts felt fairly full, but there were big gaps in the rest of the ground. (Of course, the Cricket Field Stand was next to empty too, but we have come to expect this.) The percentage of attendees actually attending turned out to be 84%, which was more than I'd predicted. (The club's pointless monkeying around with the attendance figure has forced the abandonment of the traditional London Clarets attendance sweepstake. Instead, we now bet on what the announced percentage of actual attendees will be.) Still, I suppose it had been a while since a Saturday home game. I can only see the crowds going one way now.
To think they're about to put the prices up again!
As it happened we were fortunate not to concede more. Grimsby were completely hopeless when they got sight of goal. Getting forward, past what we might as well call our midfield, was easy enough, but they didn't then seem to know what to do with it. What is it about us and Grimsby anyway? We always do our best to keep them up. Last season we submitted an abject display at Blundell Park and ensured we would play them again this year. This season we managed to lose by the odd goal in eleven away and never looked like taking more than a point from them in this game. We must really love those fish and chips.
Grimsby scored when the torpid Davis nodded off and handed the ball to Stuart Campbell. Campbell ran on to roll it home with ease. It's hard for Clarets of my generation to see Davis like this. He was a hero and an icon. When he came back from Luton, I was thrilled. It's sad to see him looking unfit and slower than ever.
In keeping with my pledge to squeeze as much novelty from the season, I moved seats at half time, trading an excellent view above the halfway line for a sun-kissed seat leaning on the concrete at a corner of the front row. I took my jacket off! At Turf Moor! Truly, this was an end of season game. On the pitch, we looked a bit brighter for having Alan Moore on. I can't believe I just wrote that. He replaced an out-of-sorts Blake, whose attempts to carry off his trademark turns had never looked like working. Much more of this and I will revoke my apology.
We had the ball in the net when Ian Moore was offside, and shortly after, Alan Moore scored. With a header. Really. Davis offered some atonement for his earlier error by heading on a corner and A Moore dived in pretty bravely. Well done, Alan. Cue idiotic music.
It's probably typical of his luck that he shortly afterwards went off injured with what looked like a hamstring problem. We never looked likely again. Arthur made some good runs forward but couldn't produce a telling ball, while Little wandered in and out of the game. We had nothing going on in midfield, and needless to say, up front we missed Taylor. No-one made runs. A Moore's replacement, Papadopoulos, was again not of the required standard. I'm disappointed with Papa. I want players to stay on their feet, because I think that's how you score goals. More than this, I don't like to see Burnley players cheating, but if they are going to cheat, I'm embarrassed that they do it so badly.
Stupidly, Grimsby contented themselves with time-wasting for most of the second half. I guess beforehand they'd have settled for a point, but with more adventure they really could have taken all three. The game therefore drifted, irritatingly slowly, to its unsatisfactory conclusion, in an atmosphere-free ground. I had a quick look through the programme, at the articles which occasionally punctuate the various exhortations to give BFC more of our money. (After years of not buying programmes, on the grounds that they're crap, I've got myself into this absurd superstition about getting them at home matches, because I did for the Wolves game on Boxing Day and we've not lost every time I've done it since.) I flicked through a fanzine, too. The game was still going on. With stoppages and sponsored-by-someone injury time, we were still playing at five o'clock. Remember when you could expect to be out of the ground at ten to five! When I joined the London Clarets we used to have time for a pint before getting the first train back to Preston. If we were still travelling that way, we'd have missed it on Saturday.
Ian Moore was announced to be the winner of the portable phone user's man of the match, the marketing boys' latest wheeze. You text a squad number. Price of said text message, presumably at premium rate, was not announced. Wonder if they'd do this if they didn't make any money out of the texts. Well, what do you think? There are times when I think it would be easier for the club just to employ a team of pickpockets and relieve us of our small change on the way in. Still, I think there's potential to extend this idea. Perhaps one of the substitutions could be decided by text vote. It would have been bad news for Tony Grant, but there you go.
For what it's worth, I though Ian Moore was a reasonable choice. He tried, he worked hard, and it wasn't his fault there was no midfield. I always say that you shouldn't get praise for trying hard, that commitment is a minimum, but sadly here it marked him out above most.
And eventually, at something like five past five, out and onwards to more interesting things, such as a few pints in Leeds and an unaccountably jolly train journey home. Not much incident in this report, I concede, but then, not much happened.
It's a truism, but we are where we deserve to be. We are a mid-table side. At no point in the season have we been higher than eighth, so why would we think we ought to make the play-offs? This has been a season characterised by lack of consistency. We have been brilliant and dreadful and in between there's been a fair amount of boredom. It's frustrating now because a couple of weeks ago we looked to be on the threshold of something unlikely and exciting, and then we ballsed it up. I do say that every season we spend in the First Division is a success, and that after four games when I thought we were doomed I'm happy to have avoided that by miles, but there is part of me that thinks things have got stale and need a shake-up. The summer will be important.
Subs not used: Michopoulos, McGregor.
Referee: F G Stretton (Nottingham).
Scorers: (Burnley) Alan Moore 52 / (Grimsby) Campbell 43.
Attendance: 13,445.
Firmo's man of the match: Ian or Alan Moore.
Friday night and Saturday morning