Everything
about the morning screamed to turn back and go home. All omens were against me. At six
thirty I was cleaning my glasses when I broke them. This sparked an increasingly desperate
hunt for the spare pair, naturally hindered by the fact that I couldn't see anything. My
wife had to get out of bed and dig them out of a dusty drawer. Immediate Brownie Point
loss, plus what kind of portent was this? I was already trying to cope with the
consequences of the Night Before. I should have learned from Bournemouth that it is
ill-advised to visit a beer festival the night before a Burnley game. Then there was the
ankle. The Night Before, charging at top speed towards said beer festival, I'd gone over
on my weak right ankle yet again, and walking was still a slow and very painful affair.
Spare glasses giving weird perspective, my eyes telling me the ground was slanted, my feet
telling me it was flat, I hobbled to the nearest tube station that hasn't been closed down
yet. Crossing the road was scary too. Distances couldn't be trusted. Eventually I arrived
at Euston to learn that no trains were leaving. Emergency work. Still, we made it to
Preston merely forty minutes late. It's been worse. And yet I pressed on. I would not
abandon my plan. I haven't seen enough home games. Since New Year, I'd only caught the
stirring win over Bristol Rovers and deflating defeat against Preston. With options dwindling, I just wanted to see a standard
home game that we could expect to win. After all, we would win, wouldn't we? We'd
recovered well from that 4-2 capitulation at Gigg Lane. Tables
don't lie at this stage. We were clearly the better side. While stuttering somewhat
lately, this was a game a side seeking promotion, albeit by a dubious route, should win.
Ah well, the portents were right. A 6am warm bed would
have been the sensible choice. As if determined to prove that there are mysterious forces
shaping our life on this earth, Burnley duly served up a defensive crapfest straight out
of the old days.
For some weeks now, in response to my concerns about
the way we were playing, people have told me that at this stage of the season, it's all
about results. Forget the performance. The points are everything. To some extent, I can
sympathise with that view. A steady accumulation of the eightyish points required to
guarantee a place in the play-offs would be an unanswerable justification for any number
of unconvincing displays. True, we might have cause to wonder about whether we're going to
improve once that new competition starts, but we'd worry about that if it happens. Only we
haven't been steadily collecting the points. We've consistently started to drop them. You
can't win every game, but two out of three of the recent matches against Luton, Blackpool
and Bury should have yielded wins. Against this, only the point at Gillingham was an
unexpected bonus. Each slip up puts pressure on the next fixture.
And, to turn the argument round, I'd worry less if we'd
played well and not won. That would give me hope that they next week we could play well
and get a better result. But here, we played badly. A number of individual players put in
bad performances. As a team, we did not pass to each other, did not play the ball on the
floor and did not take shots at goal. Our tactics were mistaken, our team selection
misguided and our substitutions ill thought through. Of course, this is not what the
official version will say. That will point to Andy Payton's second 'goal', a cool finish
from a perfectly weighted Little ball, ruled out for at best a close offside. They might
record that the free kick from which Bury scored their second should not have been given.
The late shot that Jepson leathered off the post might be mentioned. Ternent could well
bring together these disparate threads to weave a beautiful excuse. But for anyone who saw
the game, it would still seem pretty threadbare. Burnley played badly, went ahead, tried
to defend and got caught. We've been saying all season that sooner or later we would come
unstuck defending a 1-0 lead, and this was the day it finally came about. In passing, you
may wonder why we set out to defend a 1-0 lead at home to a side half a division lower
anyway?
We did not win this game because we were insufficiently
committed to attack. We were not brave enough or positive enough. We did not seize the
initiative. And, given that we do not actually have a midfield - I consider this to be a
fact so firmly established that I do not need to spend any more time demonstrating it -
sitting on a lead is never going to be the easiest or most sensible option.
As for the actual details of the match, the first half
contained nothing worth noting. After Blackpool, Ternent had performed his usual no choice
shuffle, dropping Mellon for Mullin. Otherwise it was unchanged. As it happened, Mullin
was one of our few bright players, running, getting involved and instigating the odd
attack. Thomas charged forward a lot too. With no Bury player in his way, he had little
defensive work to perform and nothing to stop him bombing forward. Nothing wrong with
this, although with all the respect our Mitchell isn't the man you'd most want to see
leading an attack. I hoped for a change of tactics which would swap defenders and leave
Davis the spare man, but it did not come. Otherwise, except for Cox and Davis looking
authoritative at the back, the half was stand to stand mediocrity.
Half time under the Harry Potts Longside stand was
marked by a lot of raised eyebrows and muttered 'oh dears'. No one could mistake Burnley
for a branch of the entertainment business.
We got the goal which should have been the breakthrough
early into the second half. It was a move which summed up what we are capable of. Glen
Little took the ball wide down the right. His brilliant change of direction flat footed
the defenders. As they ran the wrong way, he popped a cross onto Payton's head. Payton
still had work to do, with a defender and goalkeeper close by, but no one can finish like
him. It was a perfect way to celebrate his new contract, a reminder that no one else in
the team can score the goals he does, without which we'd be at best nowhere.
A side with verve and fire in its belly would now have
gone on to put Bury to the sword. They should have been routinely and clinically
despatched. A month or so they would have been, but we make hard work of it now. Instead
of finishing the job, we sat back, giving them every encouragement to come at us.
That we were defending was emphasised by the
substitutions. Paul Cook needed to be taken off, but bringing on Jepson in his place was a
signal that we were hanging on to what we had. It seemed very early to bring him on, but
this has become the pattern when we’re in front. And if it means that Cook comes off
earlier, then for that we should be thankful, although it doesn’t help us get closer
to solving the question of how Cook continues to hang onto his starting place. To watch
him now is painful. He’s always been not the team's fittest player and has tended to
hang deep, but earlier on he was making up for it with quick thinking and the ability to
hit a telling pass. I rated him one of our best in the first months of the season. Now he
has completely lost his way. Only a minimal physical presence is required to put him off
his game, he has lost the range of his passing and if he played any deeper he would
actually have to sit in the stand behind the goal, although that might be to his liking. I
suspect Cook himself knows that he is not currently up to the demands of the game, and is
therefore doing what any sensible pro would: trying to stay out of trouble and get through
the game. But at this stage of the season, we cannot carry passengers. The team is
everything, and if someone isn’t pulling their weight, they need leaving out. I feel
sorry for Cook, as I know he’s capable of being a good player, but for the last
couple of months he has not justified a place. But then, what options do we have? Our
failure to improve this section of the squad before transfer deadline day was perplexing.
Apparently either Michael Thomas or Nicky Daws might have signed. This could cost us dear.
Not that Cook was the only passenger. His near
namesake, Andy Cooke, had a terrible game. People are starting to lose patience with
Cooke. Two years ago he scored twenty goals in a worse side. He should have progressed.
Instead he seems to have gone backwards. I appreciate that he works hard, but in this game
his failings were obvious and without mitigation. He didn’t get anywhere near goal.
What summed it up for me a chance he had for a header. Instead of hitting the target, he
put in tamely across goal in the hope that someone else would finish. A striker of true
quality would have tried to score. In the second half he was reduced to looking for free
kicks. I think this has been a crunch season for Cooke, and he has been found wanting.
Whatever his other attributes, the job of a striker is to score goals, and he hasn't. In a
reasonably successful team, he should now be on target for twenty goals. Less than half
that isn’t good enough. When he was taken off, I felt it was the right thing to do.
Still, bringing on Mellon? What could Ternent possibly imagine this lightweight would do?
It would have been more honest to play the rest of the game with ten men.
Other unacceptable performances came from Branch,
Johnrose and Crichton. Actually, I felt Branch didn’t have a bad first half, but
sooner or later the opposition sussed out, as they always do, that he is vulnerable if
someone runs at him. Adrian Littlejohn, coming on to predictable boos, did just that. In
his defence, people tell me that he is an attacking player rather than a defender, so we
should make allowances. I still have my doubts. A player with true attacking instincts
would have tried a shot when given clear sight of goal from the edge of the area. He ran
the ball away in the other direction. As for Johnrose, he is not a footballer. For all his
headless chicken running and occasionally effective lunging, there should not be a place
in the team for someone who cannot pass the ball. People rate him because he runs around,
and sometimes this means he’s in the right place. It comes to something when this is
considered good enough. As for Crichton, we’ve said before that he’s a competent
saver but doesn't keep goal in a complete sense. A good goalkeeper can run the defence.
Crichton a couple of times got into mix-ups when no one called. I still get the impression
that the defenders don't trust him. Daft clearances and balls out for corners seem to be
preferred to letting Crichton deal with it.
I don’t think that a side playing Burnley could
bring on two more ominous substitutes than Littlejohn and Paul Barnes. Barney, an
excellent striker for Burnley, received generous applause, and promptly had a hand in
their equaliser. No one stopped his run, no one intercepted the passes and the finish was
easy enough. The score was suddenly 1-1, and we’d made our defensive substitutions.
Ternent promptly shot from the bench to encourage the
troops. Couldn’t he have done this when we were 1-0 up?
Things threatened to get really silly when they went
ahead. We were busy feeling disappointed about the draw when the aforementioned Daws took
their free kick. In the absence of anything we might reasonably call a defensive wall and
with Crichton leaving generous amounts of space in the middle of the goal, Daws placed a
training ground shot into the big empty space.
Perhaps this was an undeserved lead. But it has to be
said, for all the roughhousing and cynicism we had expected - elbows all over the shop and
timewasting at 1-1 from their goalie all the way through to Preece - Bury had played more
controlled football than us as the half went on. We were the ones belting it forward,
chasing punts and playing head tennis. They were the ones passing it to each other and
using the ground.
Fortunately, Bury then stopped playing, and we decided
to try to make a go of it. We must have had more goal attempts in the last few minutes
than the rest of the game. Jepson was the unlikely hero. He’d looked quite sharp
pushed up alongside Payton, and he got his head to one at the corner with just enough
force to send it in. Jeppo clearly enjoys scoring late goals against Bury. And although it
gave us something to cheer at the end of a pretty miserable afternoon, having flirting
with disaster and sort of got away with it, there were few people cheering at the end.
This was a bad result and two points dropped, and most people knew it.
I expect that, stuttering though our recent form is, we
should still make the play-offs. The difference is, we could have been the side that other
teams feared. We could have charged in there confidently, but now we have the look of a
team that’s hanging on a bit. Our home form has become nothing special. Sides might
have feared to come to Turf Moor, but now after a month where we won one, drew one, lost
two there, sides know they can turn up, unsettle us early and at least get a draw. And it
is so frustrating, because I still believe that with a little more ambition, one or two
additions to the squad and a commitment to more expansive football, we could have missed
out on the play-offs for the right reason. A few weeks ago, after our win at Bournemouth,
and again after Colchester, I had a feeling we could be the side looking over the
shoulders of the top two, the ominous side coming up on the rails ready to take advantage
of any loss of form. What really annoys now is that, with Bristol Rovers faltering, it is
not us who are going to take advantage. We must re-set our sights lower. The only two
sides that matter to us now must be Notts County and Stoke, because if we finish with more
points than them we will be in the play-offs. Our small loss of form has forced us into
some mental about-turns. If Millwall play Notts County, for example, the good result for
Burnley is a Millwall win. It isn’t about catching the sides at the top any more.
It’s about not being caught by the sides below. And this is frustrating, but
it’s the reality. It’s about being sixth on May the 6th. After that,
who knows?
On a personal note, Daws’ goal was the last
cock-up of the day. I got home in one piece, full of good beer and an excellent Zagros
kebab. The Branson train even arrived ‘early’, having not used up all of its
generous pick-up time. So, in the end, I suppose it was only Burnley I couldn’t rely
on after all. What’s new?
