Claret on the Rocks
Dire straits ahead
Well, I said the opening game would be critical and so it proved to be. Given our parlous financial state, we really needed the players to dig in and give 100% to the cause and start off by taking newcomers Brighton apart - as subsequent BHA results have shown, hardly Mission Impossible. With a smidgeon of wishful thinking and trying to ignore all the adverse signs, it was possible to feel optimistic before the game. We had the same players available as last year but the contrast between the performance at Hillsborough and against Brighton couldn’t have been more marked. My optimism lasted about 15 minutes of the opening match when it was clear that the players were not ready for the start of the season mentally or physically.
The defeat was compounded by Stan’s ravings after the game when he singled out Blake for a public scapegoating. True to form Stan has subsequently imposed his usual form of banishment by confining Blake to the bench, for the next game and subsequent matches. Personally I thought that Blake did not have too bad a game in relation to the rest of them. Blake cannot help it if the rest of the established players seemed to have no idea what they are supposed to be doing, several are playing out of position and the tactics + formation look like they have been decided in the car park before the game.
Only after the Reading game did Stan apparently begin to finger the major preventable cause of the season’s miserable start: i.e. himself. He has signed all the players and it's his job to send them out ready to beat the opposition. Stan is a past master at passing the buck and the reason he has survived so long in football management is that he has learnt to blame something/body else when things go wrong.
Parallels can be drawn with last season after the “embarrassment” of the Rushden defeat when Stan banished Dimi, Maylett & McGregor for long spells in the reserves and sold John Mullin, whilst he conveniently ignored the disruptive effect that so many changes to the line-up might have had as well as the failure to play Payton against a lower league side when he scores for fun against this type of opposition.
It needs to be pointed out to the players that if they go down then they are virtually finished as players, but on the other hand they are anyway, as it's clear to them that those coming to the end of their contracts aren’t going to get them renewed. There is another group of players who have got nice fat extended contracts anyway so they will be all right whatever, and I imagine that there is a certain amount of friction between the two sets of individuals. Certainly they don’t look remotely like a team playing all for one and one for all, and self improvement has been displaced by self destruction.
In the middle of all this, we have Stan trying to whip them into shape bereft of his main means of keeping discipline and maintaining momentum: the transfer market, his habitual first resort. In the past Stan has adroitly used the transfer market to ship out players and bring a whole batch of new ones in. He used the loan system to clobber Payton and Cook last year; though they have both come back they have had to endure Stan’s internal Gulag Archipelago treatment. Although it didn’t occur overnight, BFC management seemed to have taken a long time adjusting to the current reality and have reacted by scoring perhaps the most laughable own goal of the season by declaring all their players to be for sale when there is no transfer market.
Most other clubs are not as worried by the transfer market collapse as they have youth systems to fall back on. As Stan said after the Brighton game he is not “frightened” to put kids in if the senior players don’t perform, whereas most other clubs don’t see it as a thing to fear, it happens as a matter of course. Apparently he only has 15 “players” at Derby on Saturday, so what are the junior reserves then? Whatever they are, it's hard to imagine that they could do any worse than the current seniors. This is the real nub of the tele deal collapse for Burnley. The master plan has been shot to bits as Stan thinks that nobody under 24 can play First Division football. However to be fair he has been under pressure from the "ambition crew" urging him to sign players with money the club haven’t got to "improve" the team rather than consolidate and blood youngsters in front of the increasingly intolerant hordes filling the Coliseum.
Sultans of swing
Apparently there was a Board meeting this week and instead of bleating about tele money and blaming things they cannot control, the people running the club have got to start addressing the problem in hand, and focus on winning a few football matches with the players we have got. So far Stan, the players and the Board have made a complete dog’s breakfast of starting the season, however the room for manoeuvre looks limited. As for sacking Ternent, I can’t see what would actually be achieved by this. He has stated he won’t resign and he has never walked away etc but we all know that he has famously offered to stand down before but Barry asked him not to. Furthermore, due to finances I can’t imagine an appointment other than somebody already within the club, like Ellis, Docherty or Jeppo.
There is no point bombing Stan out unless there is some plausible alternative ready and waiting in the wings, I guess somebody like Brian Flynn might do the job temporarily. Whoever comes in it would be a huge risk, although the alternative, keeping Stan, is becoming to look increasingly risky as the season goes on as we stagger from one dire result/performance to the next. Defeat at Derby will mean, I think, that we will have had a worse start to the season than when Waddle was in charge, which I suppose is some encouragement as we did survive in the end, and Stan might do well to note that survival was probably achieved by the Waddler’s one astute piece of transfer market business, i.e. the swop of Barnes for Payton.
Basically the Board has to work out if Stan can get those players who are not pulling their weight to start playing, or if the ones that are playing would stop if Stan left. It’s a hard one to call. However, it will be interesting to see if Barry renews Stan’s contract or not, and if he complains about not getting a new one, whether Barry loans him out to Wigan for a couple of months.
Either way the Board need to decide now what they are going to do and publicly state that Stan will stop for the rest of the season even if we go down, so supporters and players know exactly what the score is and we can all dig in and get on with it. Frankly the chances of survival currently look low as 41 nil nil draws won't be enough, and how many bloody acorns fall off one oak tree every autumn? However there is a long way to go and undoubtedly many twists and turns before the fat lady sings.
Looking to the future football finances will have to be re-shaped, and a club like Burnley will have to look at the way other clubs of similar size have expanded their growth. Bolton have tapped the Scandinavian market, Charlton and Ipswich have gone for youth plus low budget signings from the lower Divisions, the latter two sources completely eschewed by Stan, as it was by Jimmy Mullen. The Directors will now have to re-direct the club having pursued an option which is no longer available to them for the foreseeable future.
Igor Wowk
September 2002
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