The most common reaction from Burnley supporters to the sale
of Paul Crichton to Norwich would seem to be 'how much?' The fact that Uncle Stan was able
to extract £150,000 - plus a possible further £50,000, depending on appearances - for
the sale of someone who was never going to start the season as anything other than our
reserve keeper seems testament to our manager's shrewdness. Ternent, clearly got more for
Crichton than many of us might have expected. Even a few days before, a figure of
£100,000 had been suggested, and that sounded like a pretty good deal to me. We bought
him for £75,000, and I imagine West Brom snatched that out of our hands pretty quickly.
Crichton, it should be recalled, has more often than not moved for nothing in his career,
and it might not have been so surprising had he done so again. A free transfer to
Blackpool would have been unremarkable. So, not a bad deal for Burnley, and off you go,
Paul, with best wishes for the future, and the promise of a good reception when you play
against us.
It might be a bit unfair if Crichton's epitaph became
'sold for more than he was worth', as he wasn't a bad player. He was, when you come down
to it, a not bad goalkeeper: perhaps an average keeper, with good reflexes, rather lacking
in charisma, prone to the odd mystifying error, who put in a string of better than average
performances during our promotion season. In short, not the best goalkeeper, but by no
means the worst. We've had some bad goalkeepers in recent years - one thinks immediately
of Mark Kendall - and Crichton wasn't one of them. An honest pro, is Paul, whose career
hasn't earned many headlines. The fact that the promotion he got with us was his first
says something. At Burnley, he reached rare heights, with an inspired run of form that
must have been the best of his career during the charge to promotion in 2000. He was a
crucial player, and, playing above himself, he was a key player in our success.
It’s fair to say that he wasn’t always
particularly rated, although he did join the club at a difficult time. When waddle did the
decent thing and Roeder followed (surely destined for a lifetime of obscurity) the club
was rather carelessly left without a first team goalkeeper. Bit of an oversight. We eked
our way through pre-season with the slender reserve team resources of Tony Parks and Craig
Mawson, and just when it looked like one of them might play actual competitive football,
Uncle Stan pulled off one of his surprises and brought Crichton in on loan at the brink of
the season. Just as quickly as he came, he was gone. West Brom recalled him after only one
game, and we turned instead to Gavin Ward from Bolton, also on loan. Ward played well, and
was popular with the supporters, but when his three months were up, we couldn’t
afford to sign him. So on November 18, in the aftermath of a disgraceful FA Cup defeat at
Darlington where we hadn't got away with playing Norwegian exchange student Frank Petter
Kval in goal, we signed Paul Crichton. £75,000 might not sound much, but in those still
recent troubled times, it was the first time money signing for more than a year.
Crichton walked into a club in a mess. On his first
game after signing properly, we lost 5-0 away to Bournemouth. It wasn’t an auspicious
start. He was in for a bumpy ride, and it’s questionable whether the nadir was a
performance so bad it still hurts, when we lost 4-0 at Fulham in December, or the
successive 5-0 and 6-0 home defeats against Gillingham and Man City in February and March.
Those were shocking times, and it’s not that long ago. But as we know, somehow, we
pulled ourselves back, and we finished the season with an eleven match unbeaten run that
brought safety with comfort. Crichton played his part in a sequence of dogged defensive
displays, although the last two games, once safety had been secured, really showed the
ying and yang of his form. Against a Wigan side desperate to win, he shut them down,
saving a penalty with grim determination; at Northampton, it was hard to forgive his
carelessness in allowing the hated Lee Howey’s header in.
At that time, I wasn’t much of a Crichton fan. I
thought he had more bad games than good. I remember arguing with Barry Kilby at the London
Clarets AGM that Crichton was, at best, a mediocre keeper, and if we wanted to progress,
we needed someone better than average. I felt we’d need someone else in if we were
going to challenge.
Ah well. As usual, I was wrong. The next season he was
ever present, we got promoted, and he played like a good keeper. He fulfilled the brief of
being a decent keeper in a winning team, by having more good games than bad, not cocking
things up too often and occasionally being inspired, particularly in crucial games at the
season's end. Some differences of opinion began to emerge here. There were those who rated
his shot stopping ability, his commitment, and his bravery at never hesitating to go in
where boots were flying; on the other hand, there were those who could never stop being
nervous when the ball approached the box, who felt that the shot stopping skills were so
often required because of positional hesitancy, and who pointed to the fact that the
defenders didn’t play like they could rely on him. I wavered, but in the end I came
down on his side. From being the Anti-Crichton the season before, I became a qualified
fan. He might have been an average player playing out of his skin and pushing himself to
unexpected heights, but isn’t that a perfect symbol of a Ternent team working hard to
become more than the sum of its parts?
If I hadn’t been won over before, his undoubted
finest hour and a half, away at Brentford that Easter, would have done it for me. Needing
a win but losing, he threw himself around at everything, as inspirational at one end as
Ian Wright was as the other, as we turned it around for a vital win. Crichton that day
produced simply a world class display of reflex shot stopping. It was, finally, time to
take your hat off to the Admirable.
That said, it was still legitimate to have some doubts
about how he might fare in the first division. After all, if he'd been playing out of his
skin in the second, how long can you expect someone to do that one level higher? I looked
back at the match reports from the start of the 2000-2001 season, and there are quite a
few references to Crichton's apparent nervousness in those early games. Only in a snatched
1-0 win at Palace did we see some Brentford style shot-stopping, which won him the London
Clarets man of the match vote. And then, of course, along came Nik the Greek (whose first
game wasn't Huddersfield away, as is often thought, but a 2-2 home draw in the league cup,
again against Palace). Until then, Crichton had been ever present since he signed in
November 1998. He was not to start another Burnley match.
It was a shock at Huddersfield when Michopoulos was
chosen in goal. We assumed at the time that Crichton had been dropped. Of course, it later
turned out that he was, apparently, stuck in traffic on the way to the game. Hmm. I've
often wondered about that. Players seem to have a knack of picking up injuries when Stan
wants to drop them, too. Whatever truth there was in it, that was it for Crichton. Nik the
Greeks' virtuoso display made him the de facto number one. Crichton's one last first team
game was an almost inevitable substitute appearance at West Brom, where he remains hated.
I'll never forget all four sides of the ground singing, 'there's only one Paul Crichton',
for different reasons, when we realised he was going to come on. We really got behind him,
and I wondered if that rousing reception was tinged with nervousness that he might drop a
clanger. Roy of the Rovers logic that day dictated that he should have a brilliant game,
or a terrible one. He had neither.
Perhaps he'll have neither when he comes to play
against us, although we normally expect them to have a blinder. Remember David Williams
transforming into the best goalie in the world when he turned out for Rochdale against us,
while out on loan? Should we hope for Crichton to make one of his occasional mistakes if
he turns out at the Turf as a Canary next season? Perhaps Stan will know how to beat him.
Or do we want their goalie who let in Kevin Ball's less-than-scorcher away last season to
get another run out? I recall that, after we beat Norwich 3-2 away, their manager, Megson,
said Norwich needed to emulate Burnley. He appears to have meant it literally.
Objectively, we now have a better keeper in
Michopoulos, and it didn't make sense keeping Crichton around the reserves if someone
wanted to pay a good amount of money for him. Michopoulos, too, is capable of making
mistakes, but he has more presence, more charisma, and this seems important. Burnley
supporters always seem to like a goalkeeper with a bit of personality. Think back to
Marlon, Marriott, Chris Pearce, even. If these weren't always the best keepers, they were
personalities the crowd got on with. Gavin Ward, in his short time, seemed to have a
better relationship with the crowd than Crichton ever managed. Michopoulos, with his one
handed catch party trick, already has a better rapport. Perhaps these things aren't
important, but what is, is that both crowd and players have confidence in a keeper. I feel
a whole lot more confident when Michopoulos is under pressure than when Crichton was.
I also think back to that mad train journey back from
Lincoln in 1999, when Crichton sat quietly in a corner of the train and sneaked off at
Nottingham. He could have won a lot of people over by joining in, but he didn't.
Goalkeepers can get away with being a bit daft; they should be charismatic figures;
Crichton wasn't. He was curiously understated.
What is interesting about Crichton's departure is what
it says about the club's progress, as was the case with the other recent departures, of
Andy Cooke, Chris Brass and Paul Smith. These are all decent players with many second
division games between them. They all, arguably, had something to offer. Crichton was
probably a decent enough player for division two, but perhaps you need someone better if
you plan to be in the top ten of the first division, which must be what we continue to
aspire to. That means making tough decisions, and it means letting some players go who you
can't see getting into the team on a regular basis. These are players of reasonable
standard who can continue to play professional football at a reasonable level. These are,
even, players we might like. And this weird. Previously, we've had the real rubbish to get
rid off - people like Neil Moore or Michael Williams - or kids who are painfully never
going to make it. Now we're getting rid of people we have some affection for. This is
something to get used to, because it's something that will happen more as we seek to
improve. Crichton won't be the last.
