Play-offs here we come?
Burnley 0 Preston 3, 4 March
2000
Firmo
The first
leg of the play-off semi-finals is Sunday 14th May. The second leg follows on
Wednesday 18th. I will not tempt fate by speaking of the finals. These dates
have now become relevant because this dreadfully disappointing game has ensured that the
rest of the season is all about hanging onto our play-offs position. Automatic promotion
is now no longer something we can think seriously about.
This sad display was pure Old Burnley. We've
been set up for disappointment before, had hopes and expectations raised only to have them
exposed as utterly without foundation. We're past masters at fluffing our lines on the big
occasion. But these days I thought we had a bit more fight about us. I thought we didn't
do stuff like that anymore. Wrong!
Preston were good, looking a much more powerful
side than when we played them at Deepdale, but then, we allowed them to be. They looked
faster and fitter than our lot, and had clearly worked out a game plan which was to close
us down, not give us time to ponder on the ball, and get players forward early in counter
attacks. It worked. If this was a tactical battle, then it was one Ternent comprehensively
lost.
On the strength of this, Mitchell Thomas can
walk into Ternent's office tomorrow morning and demand a massive pay rise. We may well
have to give him the keys to Burnley. Or get the boys at Burnley College to do some
serious research into cloning now. Thomas knows that his place in the team is utterly
assured. Twice this season he has been missing, and twice we have performed woefully.
Without him, we fall apart. What happens if he gets injured?
Andy Payton, too, must have felt his position
grow stronger as he attempts to negotiate a new contract with every minute of the three
games he has missed. In that time, only one player has scored. If people doubted how much
this low scoring team relies on this one man to score the bulk of the goals, they should
do so no longer. My view after the Bristol Rovers match that, although we had got the
points, Payton's sending off meant they got more out of the game than us has been proved
unfortunately right. What is disappointing is that in Payton's absence, other players who
should have made up the gap, should have responded, who haven't all season been scoring
enough goals anyway, have not weighed in. This includes Cooke, Cook, Mullin, Little,
Branch - and Ian Wright.
I'm waiting for someone to admit that Wright
isn't working. I might have a long wait. We're still star struck, but the harsh fact is
that he isn't performing at the level we expected. Having missed his debut, I have seen
his following two games, and he looks poor. He's not sharp, pretty slow and he's not
fitting in with the rest of the team. That sentence is pretty much heretical at the
moment, but ask yourself this. If this was a new lad signed from division three who no one
had heard of, would you be happy at the way he was playing? Would you be starting to think
we'd been sold a pup? Wasn't Alan Lee being summarily judged after a couple of poor
performances? Was anyone applauding and shouting 'unlucky' every time he buggered up?
Not that it is fair to single out one player for
criticism. We were mostly bad. Davis and Cox were hopeless. How pathetic that Thomas'
absence makes such a difference. Where was the assured and composed Cox of the last few
games? Where was Davis' newly restored swagger? What we had in their place was panicky,
confused, hopeless defending. Cox in particular had a wretched first half, flustered and
nervous every time he was on the ball.
But then, can they be blamed for playing badly
in a flawed team? Faced with the problem of Thomas' absence, Ternent had a decision to
make. And he got it wrong. I reckon he knows he got it wrong, which is a good thing. His
natural reaction would probably have been to put Armstrong in and get on with it. But
Armstrong was injured. All Ternent was left with was a bunch of defenders he clearly does
not rate. With Cowan at Cambridge and Swan released that week, it would have had to be
Brass or Heywood coming in. He must not have fancied this. So West came in on the right
and we ditched the central back three, which has been such a success since Cox joined in,
in favour of a flat back four. And it was bloody flat. Rather like one of those puzzles
which consist of letters in squares you have to move around to form a word, moving one
player meant moving most of the team. A successful team with a good recent record and a
reborn reputation for stern defence was reshuffled. West in on the right meant Little was
moved into midfield. Left midfield. Where he cannot play. I thought this particular piece
of nonsense had been purged back in January? And so Little duly struggled to perform in
the first half, constantly cutting in on his stronger right foot, and thereby making
himself easy to handle. Negation of our best player: a brilliant tactic.
But it wasn't just Little out of position.
Behind him, Graham Branch, having enjoyed limited success as a left 'wingback', was
suddenly asked to play orthodox leftback, and as he and everyone else knows, there is a
world of difference between these positions. Cox and Davis, too, were out of position. Cox
has shone since he signed, but had never been asked to play as one of two central
defenders with Burnley until this, the most important game of the season. Davis only
stopped struggling this season when he stopped playing as a straightforward, marking
central defender.
In the crunch match of the season, players were
being asked to play out of position and in unfamiliar roles.
Many of these changes, particularly moving
Little, were made in order to accommodate Mullin on the right wing. Can anyone tell me why
this lightweight apparently takes such a high priority when it comes to team selection?
Can anyone remember when was the last time Mullin contributed anything useful to a game?
My patience with Mullin has just about finally been exhausted by a string of anonymous
performances. I cannot understand how this underachiever is allowed to push Little out of
his best position.
Still, everyone was better than Paul Cook. If
Mullin has faded than Cook has positively wilted. He should have been taken off after
about ten minutes. He was such a good player for us early in the season. What can have
caused this change? He laboured his way around the middle of the pitch consistently
conceding possession to Preston and failing to compete. He tried ludicrous flicks and
touches which were never going to come off. I'm no fan of the Mellon, but he couldn't have
been worse than this. Or perhaps the solution is to go out and get the midfielder we so
desperately need? Burnley are a team without a core, and central midfield seems to be
Ternent's weak spot, as nothing we have tried so far has consistently paid off. As well as
the lightweight Mullin and the arthritic Cook, we have the pointless Mellon and the
headless chicken that is Lenny Johnrose. Now, some people rate Johnrose because he runs
around a lot, and any player who runs around a lot will occasionally prove effective at
disrupting the opposition. But his true nature is that he is a lunger pure and simple. He
lunges, dives in and sometimes it works. Here, he should have been sent off. A two footed
tackle that took their skipper out of the game would have been punished by a red in more
games than not. He was lucky to stay on.
Such good fortune did not abate the crowd's
criticism of the referee. And he was a bad ref. He was a bad ref for both sides. Preston
did get some decisions, but the sending off of West was, I thought, fair enough and not
entirely unwelcome. It's not as if he did anything constructive. His defending was poor,
and as for his passing, we all know that he simply cannot pass. It strikes me as odd that
anyone can carve out a career as a professional footballer without possessing the simple
ability to pass to a team-mate, but there you go. He was sent off with a straight red for
violent conduct, but even it this was harsh it would have had to be a second yellow
anyway. Before that, in common with the rest of the defence, he had been content to launch
aimless balls into an approximate midfield. There was no possession to speak off in the
first half. If we were going to play long ball, at least we could try to do it better than
this.
I felt we were fortunate to get to half time 1-0
down. The damage had been done as early as a deflating second minute. Before the match had
found any pattern, Preston were allowed to score from a simple unmarked header.
Immediately what had promised to be a great occasion started looking more like an
anticlimax. Preston were the better side and they knew it.
Perhaps it is unfair to criticise us when we
lose to the better side? But it's all about response. Up against perhaps the best side we
have faced in the league, lacking two first teamers, a goal down and then, a man short,
it's about players digging in, making their mark and standing up to be counted. All
clichés, but football is a clichéd game. This was the day when someone could pull out
something special and make a name for themselves. Instead, we just reacted. Preston ran
the game, but we let them do it. They controlled the game, and we consented. The better
side don't always win, but they do when they're not challenged.
The half time recruitment drive by the Queen's
Lancashire Regiment ("and soon we're off to Northern Ireland!") might have got a
few takers. Can I join now? Can I miss the second half?
As it happened, at least there was some fight at
the start of the second half. Ternent re-reshuffled, bringing on Brass for Cooke and
pushing Mullin up front. There was good and bad in this. Brass introduced some pace into
our less than fleet-footed defence and had a good half, often the only man back as we
pushed forward, plus Little got to play on the right, where he unsurprisingly fared much
better. However, substituting Cooke with Mullin was simply replacing a hard-working and
ineffectual player with someone worse on both counts. Still, we actually passed the ball
to each other a bit at this stage and made some half chances. We didn't produce anything
serious, and their dodgy goalkeeper was not tested and did not have to make a save, but at
least we didn't lie down and die. We even finally got Paul Cook off, although the changes
we made were hardly designed to strike fear into the opposition: Mellon on, plus Smith for
Mullin, sparking another positional change, with Smith going on the left wing and Branch
becoming the third player of the day to play somewhere near Wright up front. We didn't
have many options. As someone commented, it was very much a defending-a-narrow-lead kind
of subs bench.
Unfortunately, we were always going to leave
ourselves vulnerable to the counter attack, and duly it came. Preston broke with men over.
Crichton did well to save the first shot, but unfortunately their player didn't panic when
the rebound came to him; instead of firing it back he rolled it across to a team-mate
running in, who couldn't miss and didn't.
Game over. They even brought Eyres on to hurt us
a bit more. As it happened, I was to see a minute of his game. A shot into the corner of
the net just eluded Crichton and we made our excuses and left.
The Three Goal Rule has a long and honourable
history, and has been implemented at any number of away grounds. Yet this game brought an
unwanted first. Not only was this the first game I've walked out on this season (my driver
refused to leave Bury), but it was also the first ever time I've turned my back on Turf
Moor. Sure, if I'd been around for some of the horrors of last season I'd have reached
this milestone now, but it was still a sombre moment. I thought I'd never do it. Oh, and
cheers for the tosser who called a friend a 'part-time supporter' by the way. This is a
man who routinely gets home from away games at 1am. See you at Wrexham and Gillingham!
And as the Preston party erupted - they larged
it and who can blame them - and I reflected that I never thought 18,000 Clarets could be
so silent, I discovered that lots of us had come to the same conclusion, and I was having
to queue to leave the Turf during a game. It was pretty busy outside, too. I've been to
home games where there's been less people around at the final whistle than this.
Alcoholic oblivion was duly ensured. The next
day brought sore heads, tired bodies and a realisation that we are not good enough for
automatic promotion. We now need to work to ensure that we are one of the four teams
eligible to play the post-season game of bingo known as the play-offs. A couple of crumbs
of comfort were a defeat for the Bastards at Tranmere and having the best crowd in the
Nationwide League, although that second silver lining is tinged with regret - we had that
many there to watch this? Now we need to bounce back with something convincing ASAP. The
presence of Mitchell Thomas and - one hopes - Andy Payton should make that job easier.
This will also enable the restoration of a system that our players know they can play in
and tactics that they understand. It will also help that we don't have to play sides as
good as Preston for the rest of the season. So it's not ever yet. But let's learn not to
let our hopes get ahead of us for a while, shall we?
Team: Crichton,
West, Branch, Davis, Cox, Johnrose, Cook (Mellon 65), Mullin (Smith 65), Little, Cooke
(Brass 46), Wright. Subs not used: Jepson and Robertson.
Links
- More from this game, the away game and this game last season
