Clarets tame the cabbage patch
kids
Lincoln 1 Burnley 1, 30th January 1999
Firmo
There are some games which are loaded
with significance, bursting with incident, and are consequently utterly unforgettable.
Then there are the others: routine, unimportant and instantly forgotten, games which slip
from the mind’s grasp the moment you walk through the front door of the first post
match pub. This was one of those.
This was a game of little skill and no great
excitement. The main thing about it was that we didn’t get beat. While it
couldn’t be said we were exactly lucky to get a draw, it wouldn’t have been
surprising had Lincoln won.
We should say at the start that the pitch
didn’t help. More than that, it hindered. I don’t know how severe the winter has
been in Lincolnshire, but instead of the verdant sward we are accustomed to at the
perennially damp Turf Moor, we were expected to play on something closely resembling a
freshly ploughed field. Stan called it a cabbage patch. One half expected to see a
scarecrow stood rigid in the goalmouth, or an irate farmer, shotgun in hand, warning the
players to get off his land. I’m no conspiracy theorist, but when you bear in mind
that Lincoln’s chairman is a leading potato baron, you wonder whether his occupation
of the ground has a hidden agenda, and worry that the Imps fans might get a nasty surprise
come spring.
I’m not normally one to take comfort in
Mullenisms, but this pitch made a big difference to our ability to play. It was awful. I
know both sides play on it, but Lincoln get to train on it. It held the ball up and sapped
strength. Inevitably this kind of pitch rewards direct, aerial play. Our ball players
couldn’t play the ball. It's not a massive logical journey from reckoning that
Lincoln must be happy playing on such a leveller of a pitch to questioning whether Lincoln
make damned sure the pitch is so bad. Is it a deliberately bad pitch?
Or perhaps we've just watched one Oliver Stone
film too many. Still, Lincoln give the impression of being a small club making use of
every means at their disposal to hang onto their place in this division. Not that they
don't have every right to do that. Not for us the Man City attitude that we shouldn’t
be playing 'teams like these'. We still had the job of matching them. I think over the
ninety minutes, we just about did. We certainly coped better than in those miserable
months before Christmas when we would turn up get hammered, and skulk home. This is a
tougher side. It needed to be.
Lincoln started the first half quickly and
aggressively; we looked sluggish in comparison. If they had scored early on, we might have
struggled to respond. They did indeed get the ball in the net, but it was ruled out,
perhaps fortunately, apparently for a foul on Crichton. We all jeered their premature
celebrations, then breathed a sigh of relief.
We couldn’t get to grips with
Lincoln’s fast, direct and sometimes attractive play. They were clearly out for a
win. We couldn’t clear the ball from defence, got bogged down - often literally - in
midfield, and had no outlet in attack. There, Cooke was willing, but was often on the
wrong end of a cross, having to play them in rather than be there to finish them. He
hasn’t got the skill to do this, but at least he was more determined than of late.
Payton never got going, and after one or two games like that, you wonder whether he
isn’t still carrying an injury. We had, on paper, a very attacking team, with two
wingers, but for varying reasons, Little and Branch didn’t contribute. Little was
subdued, finding the surface heavy going being not yet fully fit, but also, and perhaps
for the first time, playing against someone who could handle him. This is so rare that we
should give Lincoln’s left back some credit; he got the better of Little time and
again. He made one penalty area tackle in the second half of sublime quality, but mostly
stopped the danger long before that. Perhaps it wouldn't have mattered if Branch had been
in the game on the other side, but he had his least effective match so far. He used the
ball wastefully in good positions, and a number of Lincoln’s attacks arose from his
poor distribution. His chief asset is pace, and his habitual method is to knock the ball
past his man then beat him in a race, but his recent chest infection has clearly taken a
lot out of him, and without his turn of speed, he looked laboured.
So, three out of four attackers were off song,
and the two man midfield was outnumbered. Armstrong was determined but profligate and
Mellon got stuck in the mud instead of getting stuck in. Too few of our balls found our
men and too many found touch. Given this, the defence had much work to do. In the
circumstances, I felt Reid and Davis coped reasonably well, being asked to do a lot of
work in the air. Sadly, neither fullback possesses anything approaching a positional sense
or an ability to pass, so we caused ourselves avoidable problems. Morgan is aggressive but
is drawn to the ball like a moth to a flame, so leaves huge gaps when they play the
obvious ball past him. Compare this to Davis, who rarely needs to attack the ball because
his positioning is good. Neil Moore is basically Morgan but slower and without the
aggression. In fairness, he's not a right back, and he's taller, so he wins some in the
air. But he's not fast enough on the ground and he shirks a tackle. He mustn’t be
picked any longer than necessary. And, since positioning is surely something that can be
learned, the two of them should be kept behind after training for remedial classes.
We could hardly therefore feign surprise when
they scored. Nevertheless, it was a move tinged with good fortune from first to last. A
poor throw in down our right fell kindly, and shot followed cross, but Crichton saved
well, getting in the way of the hard low drive. It bounced out and, with defenders closing
in, came straight back to their player, who forced it in the second time around. He was
the same man whose goal earlier was disallowed, so I guess he had a point to prove.
It then became a question of hanging on until
half time in the hope that we could change something. Crichton made the job harder with a
succession of poor kicks which went straight out of play, allowing them to keep pressing.
Although he was his usual shot-stopping self, our keeper didn’t have the best of
games, also causing more than a couple of palpitations on crosses. Work for the
goalkeeping coach, there.
We made half time with no further damage, and
started the second half stronger. I’d had a suspicion that Lincoln simply
wouldn’t be able to maintain that pace and level of commitment on that pitch for
ninety minutes, and so it proved. We asked the wingers to do more work, making them (I
hate the word, but) play more like wingbacks, moved Moore inwards and stuck Morgan in
midfield. We became more direct, less pretty but more effective. We stepped up the pace,
tried to apply pressure and stopped dwelling on the ball. In the circumstances, it was
probably the only thing to do. We still had no clear chances, but Lincoln were restricted,
so we had the hope we might snatch something.
We duly did. For the second week running, we
scored from a well-worked set piece. Honestly. Mellon might not have had his best games,
but he can still take a corner. His expertly placed ball met the head of Reid, who planted
it squarely and firmly in the net, thereby securing his man of the match status.
For the first time that day, we outshouted the
Lincoln fans. I should explain that they had no little artificial assistance. They had a
drummer, who syncopated all the chants and beat a tattoo at every glimmer of a Lincoln
chance, along with some less noisy members of a band. My abhorrence of such fake devices
is total; there can be no place this nonsense in English football. A good atmosphere is
spontaneous. It has no need of such man-made stimuli. It is to our eternal credit that
these ideas have always been given short shrift by us Clarets. Long may that continue.
The drumming might have been bearable, but on
top of that there was an air raid siren too. Yes, an air raid siren. It sounded each time
Lincoln got a free kick, sometimes for a throw in. This was irritating beyond words. We
got the measure of it in the second half, mind. A Burnley dead ball saw massed Clarets
turning imaginary handles and sounding the alarm. They stopped after that. And, on the
6.04 from Lincoln to Newark, we proved we need no assistance to get a song going.
Still, all this did its job, helping create an
atmosphere out of proportion to the size of the crowd. Lincoln, while a team of no obvious
skill, are organised, disciplined and determined. They have the advantage of the pitch,
and the supporters do their bit. It will be interesting to see if they manage to keep it
all together to pull of an escape which would pass for great. I don't think they will, as
you can't keep playing every game like a cup final from January without running out of
steam. Don't be surprised if they collapse before Easter. I also want to see the chairman
as manager routine fail. I don't want it to catch on. It's too worrying.
That said, they almost pulled off a win.
Battersby, a player who's scored against us once or twice in the past, first got rightly
booked for diving in the penalty area - always a heartwarming sight - then blasted a shot
against the bar when clean through. It bounced down, didn't go in, and was somehow
cleared. They had other chances. Meanwhile, Stan replaced Payton with Maylett; Payton had
struggled, but I was surprised Branch stayed on. He was moved up front, but he was no
better there. I would have expected Swan to come on. This kind of game may have suited
him. Maylett looked dangerous, giving them a late scare or two by running at them. He is
different in style to Little, fast, direct, and he keeps making the most of his cameo
appearances. Every time he comes on, he always gets at least one good cross in.
Near the end, Branch found the side netting once
when he should have scored, and so did one of theirs. As usual, stoppage time was over
long. Our manager vented his tension by pulling hard on a crafty fag. We hung on, the
whistle sounded, and we went home the happier.
But as we headed up the street past the
grotesquely coloured river, the details of the game were already slipping away. Okay, it
might have had something to do with the seven pubs we visited before kick off. Quickly,
what had we learned today? That we're harder to beat and don't collapse any more. That we
score goals from dead balls and headers, not traditionally areas of expertise. That we are
capable of riding our luck, that we can make tactical changes, that our defence can absorb
some pressure, although it can't yet take everything that's thrown at it. Before Christmas
(before Davis) we'd have got nothing here. We have a greater sense of purpose these days.
Another thing we learned is that Lincoln is an
odd place. It is flat, but for one hill, which is huge, a killer to walk up, scary to walk
down. It is welcoming, but they ask £13 of you to stand on a terrace behind the goal (I
know they're desperate, but why not be honest, ask £8 and pass a bucket round for the
rest? I felt affronted that we subsidised them, yet they were sufficiently ungrateful to
score.) It's also a friendly place, yet it has England's least friendly pub, the Queen in
the West on Moor Street, which is the only pub I've ever visited in my odyssey watching
Burnley up and down this land where they have asked me to pay before they start serving in
case I do a runner. It's also a placid place, except for the one teenage apprentice
hooligan in a lemon puffer jacket who tried to get a rise out of us as we walked to the
pub. We'd won at Millwall the week before; this wasn't exactly terrifying.
So that was Lincoln. We kept the away run going,
and that was the main thing. Now we only need to win a couple of games at home, and we
will have succeeded in our mission of making this a dull, mid table season. That will be a
kind of success.
Team: Crichton, Moore,
Morgan, Mellon, Davis, Reid, Little (Robertson 87), Armstrong, Cooke, Payton (Maylett 76),
Branch. SNU: Swan.
Links - Tim Quelch's report and the home match
