Wake me up when it's over
Bournemouth 5 Burnley 0, 21st
November 1998
Firmo
Who was it who once said, "Burnley is
a nightmare from which I am trying to awake?"
This was a game the awfulness of which was beyond language. This was
a game that could drive the casual onlooker to drink or despair. This was a game which
will leave dark scars scored across the psyche of every Claret who was unfortunate enough
to attend this shambolic excuse for a fiasco.
This was bloody dreadful.
This was the team: Stan played a lightweight Australian at rightback
and a lazy loan signing at leftback. The useless leftback and last year’s reserve
striker both played in midfield, alongside a Waddle signing just back from injury who was
clearly unfit. We had two strikers, one of whom was fit, our best player couldn’t get
into the game and the goalie who we wanted to sign every bit as much as the one who’d
been playing so well for us the last few months, honest, made his second debut. The two
central defenders comprised the over-rated one and the unfit one. The subs were a couple
of teenagers and a Norwegian who had two good games a bit back. Should I stop there?
Nevertheless, we were not immediately overrun. Without ever looking
dangerous, we hung on. The team had clearly been told to put up some more fight. Morgan
took this literally. Revealing himself as every inch the journeyman player who knows he
can’t account for his place on the basis of skill so must try to compensate with
aggression alone, he lunged around all over the place. The ref took every opportunity to
deny him the pleasure of the early bath he so obviously craved. He booked him once, and
after that very pointedly didn’t book him again when he could have, resorting to the
stiff talking to. This clearly had no effect. Finally, on forty minutes, when he must have
been growing increasingly concerned about the temperature of the bath water, Morgan put in
another "tackle," for which he could only receive the second yellow and the
sending off. We weren't exactly gutted.
So, at least we had that advantage for the second half. Crichton had
pulled off one splendid save, but apart from that, nothing much happened. We had ample
time in that first half to find friends on the terracing, consider the gorgeously red sky
developing over the other end, and look aimlessly around the ground, perhaps pondering
that old maxim of lower division football: if you can see trees from the terrace, you must
be in a shitty ground. Like Preston, we applauded the team off at half time, and allowed
ourselves the hope of hanging on for a dull draw. In fact, that applause was the most
noise we made all day. The surest sign that something is rotten in the state of Burnley is
the fact that we were outsung by Bournemouth. I'll repeat that for the hard of thinking: we
were outsung by Bournemouth. This was the quietest Clarets following I have ever seen.
We did not get up a single chant. It's as if no one can see the point any more. The belief
has gone.
That was the first half, then. It wasn’t great, but it was
tolerable. We would later look back on that first half as an almost golden time. Those
were the halcyon moments of the match, if only we had known it. You see, we drew the first
half. Fine. It was the small matter of the five goals we conceded in the second half that
was the problem.
That put rather a different spin on events.
It seemed clear that a few words had been said in the Bournemouth
dressing room at half time. Possibly a phrase containing the words "taking"
"the" "there" "for" and "they’re" had been
uttered. That said, the easiest job in football at the moment must be managing whoever
happen to be playing Burnley. The team talk must be devastatingly simple: score a goal.
Morale at the club is rock bottom, players are young and inexperienced, half of them play
out of position (even the supporters spend half the game trying to work out where
everyone’s playing) and discipline is lousy. Score one goal and the rest will surely
follow. Get it wide (fullbacks are crap) or through midfield (they don’t have one),
play it on the floor or in the air, shoot from long or close range, or wait for the
penalty - it doesn’t really matter how you do it, just get a goal and they will
crumble.
So it proved. Bournemouth started attacking with greater purpose. We
were simply incapable of holding out. Against their attacks we employed the by now
familiar tactic of kicking the ball straight back to them. Possession has become a foreign
concept to us.
The details of their first passed me by. Someone kicked it. It went
in. At this moment, 250 miles north, the Burnley flag over the Bob Lord Stand was lowered
and replaced with one of purest white. The game was over.
After that, they proceeded to score at regular intervals The second
was a penalty which was pretty hard to dispute, although that didn’t stop some of our
stalwarts trying. Their player - you know they don’t have names - ran past the (at
best tokenistic) challenges of a few of ours before encountering our last man, Crichton,
who promptly brought him down. It was a clear penalty, and as the last defender denying a
clear scoring chance, there was a good case for saying Crichton should walk. As it was, in
the greatest act of getting away with it since Andy Payton got that caution from the
Burnley police, he got off with a stiff talking to. No card was shown. (Crichton was again
lucky about five minutes later - squeezed into the narrow interval between two goals -
when he fouled outside the area and was shown but a yellow.) They still buried the penalty
to make it two, though.
At that moment our thoughts turned seriously to the by now famous
"three goals rule." For younger viewers, this is the group agreement that we
leave any match where Burnley fall three clear goals behind. The philosophy behind this is
crystal clear: the team have obviously given up by that point, so why shouldn’t we?
We walk out, we go for a pint, we feel better in ourselves for not being made to look like
mugs for putting up with crap, and we get called part time supporters. That’s the
routine. At half time someone had mentioned this jokingly, and I’d responded that
this wasn’t that sort of game, and we’d still be here at the end. This had
looked like a 1-0, at best 2-0 defeat (games at Bournemouth being traditionally
low-scoring, as I’d told absolutely everyone). What I'd forgotten is that we are
currently so lacking in confidence and motivation that, what in the past would have been a
narrow defeat, now turns into a full scale rout. A friend who was at Darlington said of
our collapse there, "house of cards doesn’t really do it justice." This was
no better. It's not as if Bournemouth were even a good side.
They scored while our discussion on what we would do if they scored
was continuing, thereby rendering it immediately pointless. I made my goodbyes to some
people I wouldn't see for a bit, then exited, stage left. I think someone may have
mentioned something about "part time supporter" as I left, but I was in a hurry,
so didn’t stay around to argue the toss. Not fast enough: as we picked our way across
the carpark and headed for the darkly ominous cricket field (we were looking for a pub
called The Cricketers, so this seemed a good bet), we heard a roar: the fourth.
In the pub (as ever, empty of Bournemouth fans, even long after the
end - do they drink?) we found it was 5-0, once those who'd stayed 'til the death turned
up. This was therefore the second time this season I’ve missed two goals. The other
was at Colchester. The circumstances are as different as can be imagined.
The rest of the evening was a bit grim, really. We embarked on an
ill-judged night out in Woking. At one point we were in a pub which apparently did not
sell beer. I concentrated on drinking as much as possible in the hope of finding an
answer, or at least forgetting the question, but it didn’t work. I remember thinking,
if we’d won, on exactly the same amount to drink, we’d be rolling around on the
floor. Not even the pea fritters we purchased from a chip shop in Bournemouth - yes, a
hard ball of processed peas dipped in batter and deep fried - served to cheer us up. I
think I can still feel mine lodged in my small intestine somewhere.
Well, I’ve tried to tell the story as light-heartedly as
possible, but my attempts at humour look leaden to these eyes. This pathetic game
confirmed that the club is in what can only be called a crisis. There is something
seriously wrong at the core of the club if the team can produce another performance as
desperate as this. There were no redeeming features in the game. These look like the dying
days of an old and detested regime. One just wonders how painful and damaging the process
of removing them will be.
Oh, by the way, I know this "match report" is all over the
place, but to be fair, it’s a model of organisation compared to the team that day.
Cheers.
Team: Crichton, Robertson,
O’Kane, Ford, Brass, Reid, Little, Morgan, Cooke, Payton, Eastwood (Maylett 61). SNU:
Heywood, Vindheim.
The home match
