Five straight defeats, one
goal in four games, morale at rock bottom, disgruntled fans. Ah, it’s good to be a
Burnley supporter again, isn’t it?
Let’s face facts, we have played 25 matches, won
11, drawn 5 and lost 9; is that really so bad? Yes, I’m well aware that we are second
lowest scorers in the division (only Crewe have a worse record at putting the ball in the
net) but we do have the joint sixth best defensive record. Just over halfway through our
first Division One season for five years, we lie a respectable 10th. I’m
quite sure that even the most pessimistic of supporters will admit that they would have
taken this at the start of the season.
Sadly, life as a Burnley supporter is never simple. We
scraped into an automatic promotion place on the last day of the season, edging out a far
superior Gillingham side, by virtue of a freak 35 yard Wrexham goal, not to mention an
unusually inspired Wrexham goalkeeper. Yes, we did our bit, by despatching already
relegated Scunthorpe, but let’s be honest, how many of us had already made
arrangements at work for time off for the play-offs? Don’t get me wrong, I was as
delighted as anyone when we went up automatically and avoided the lottery of the
play-offs, but many people said then, that maybe we had won promotion a year earlier than
we would have wished, and we needed another year at the lower level in order to prepare.
Whether you agree or disagree with that statement makes
absolutely no difference to what has happened since: unfancied Burnley, one of the
bookies’ relegation favourites, powered their way up the division; many established
division one sides were despatched comfortably; Sheffield Wednesday and Wimbledon, sides
that were more used to playing their football at Old Trafford than Turf Moor, were beaten;
we were grinding out results away from home, just as we had done the previous season; the
squad had been strengthened; experience had been brought in; things were looking rosy; and
as usual we as Burnley fans began to get above our station.
It is a sign of how far we have come in so short a
time, that we began to believe in the Premiership dream. We all clambered aboard the good
ship Claret and sailed off toward the promised land. We became disdainful towards other
teams - how dare ‘little’ Grimsby nick a point at Turf Moor, not to mention
Portsmouth almost nicking all three - and at QPR we were heard to mutter ‘my god,
we’ve got to beat this lot’. Nothing wrong with optimism when supporting your
team, I know, but Burnley fans have an uncanny ability to become very arrogant, very
quickly. Maybe this is why we are universally unpopular across all four divisions: we have
this big club attitude. We had it when we were bottom of the fourth division -‘it
can’t happen to us, we won the league in 1960. Maybe it’s this attitude which
breeds such amazing loyalty amongst our support; maybe it’s this attitude which also
breeds the large moronic element that follow our club (we all know who they are: they are
the ones that people call characters, because they are understandably scared to call them
what they truly are).
Let’s not forget that just over a decade ago our
club almost died; at our lowest ebb in the mid-eighties, Turf Moor echoed to the voices of
around two thousand hardy souls. I was there. I had a season ticket for the worst years of
our club's history. That doesn’t make me special; I always got a season ticket for my
birthday, which invariably fell during the first week of the season. Now I’m reduced
to scrambling desperately along with many others who followed the team through those dark
years for tickets to the bigger games, due to the fact that my work and distance from Turf
Moor makes it unfeasible to buy a season ticket. I don’t expect sympathy. I make the
decision to live and work down here. In truth, I find it ironic.
What does irritate me, though, is just how many
thousands of fans were really at Turf Moor on that cold Friday night when Colchester
visited in 1987 - and don’t forget the 30,000 or so that made the Orient game such a
memorable occasion, or if you’d seen the rest of the season, just a pure bloody
relief (certainly there was no reason to celebrate). What about York in 1991? I don’t
think I’ve ever met any Claret that wasn’t there. It’s an inherent trait in
our support that we can never admit that we maybe didn’t go to that match, or that we
perhaps were doing something else at the time of that game. I, for one, missed both York
in 1991 and Scunthorpe in 1999. I’m not embarrassed about the fact that I’ve
managed to miss two of Burnley’s biggest games in recent history. It doesn’t
make me any less of a supporter, just as having a season ticket all those years ago
doesn’t make me any more of a supporter.
We, at Turf Moor, often enjoy slating all of
Blackburn’s ‘new’ supporters, the ones who truly believe that their club's
real rivals are Manchester United and believe that Burnley should stick to disliking Bury,
or some other lower division club. Are we really so different to them? In the 1980s we
were struggling in the fourth division on crowds that are just 10% of our big gates now;
Blackburn were surviving in the second division on crowds of around 7,000. Now for their
bigger matches in the same division they pull in 24,000. They have increased their support
in exactly the same way as we have, through success. What makes it so wrong for them to do
it, and yet so right for us to do it? The one true difference is that, during our years of
pain and obscurity, we always kept this burning desire inside of us, this one true belief,
that one day we would play them on a level playing field again. This season has been the
culmination of all those years of hurt, and yes, the match itself turned into a bit of a
disaster, but it was truly the culmination of all the dark days of pain suffered in
support of this club. If there is one charge that we can level at Blackburn, it is that
their years at the top level have instilled them with a certain degree of arrogance; they
now truly look down at us, and cannot believe that they once again have to play us. Truth
be told, there will have been a minority of their supporters who had also waited for
seventeen years to play their rivals again, but to the arrogant majority it was just
another game. Sadly, that’s football today, and hey, who are we to talk about
arrogance?
What is Burnley? I mean how do other teams supporters
really see us? Forget Blackburn, we know what they think. How many of us believe that
Burnley is a welcoming place to visit? A place where opposition fans can enjoy a good pint
in a decent pub with a spot of friendly banter with the locals, much as the majority of us
do in the majority of places? How many of us have been to Cardiff, such a dangerous and
unwelcoming place that it is safer to drink in another nearby town? Have you endured the
scary walk back to the station, sometimes with and sometimes without the police escort?
What about being locked in the ground for your own safety? Been there, read the book, too
scared to buy the T-shirt. I think that if you ask the majority of supporters of
opposition clubs, they will give you pretty much the same tale about visiting Turf Moor.
Think of the away support that turns up, apart from local derbies. There is rarely a large
away following at Turf Moor. Last season at Cardiff we must have had one of our worst turn
outs of the season, and even during the 4th Division championship season, out
of a near 17,000 crowd, only a few hundred were visiting from Burnley. This is surely
proof that human beings just don’t want to spend a Saturday afternoon avoiding
trouble. How many of us have pencilled in the trip to Edgeley Park as one to miss this
season, after the trouble and abuse we’ve suffered in recent years? Now put yourself
in the position of a supporter whose team has to play Burnley: ‘Burnley away? No,
let’s go shopping instead’. It is a fact that the majority of Burnley fans, as
I’m sure the majority of Cardiff fans, are decent people. Salt of the earth, fall
over themselves to help you, but as is the same throughout life, the minority spoil it for
the majority. As I’ve said previously, we know who they are, but until something is
done about them, can we really lay claim to our self appointed title of the best fans in
the country?
So here we are in the year 2001, tenth in the league,
lost five in a row and only scored one goal in our last four matches. Suddenly a little
bit of the arrogance is being lost; there’s talk of free fall back to Division Two,
the manager's job has come under fire from some sections of the crowd, players are being
mercilessly targeted as scapegoats for our bad run. Are we really the best fans in the
country? Are we truly as knowledgeable about football as we like to believe? All I’ve
heard for the past two weeks is doom and gloom. The arrogant streak that runs through
Burnley supporters like a fault through the Earth shows itself constantly. We cannot
expect to go through a season without losing a football match. Every side in the country
loses games, but is this really the time to start calling for the manager's head and
baiting players? I think that we all know that the squad is not strong enough; in my
opinion we have at least three players in Weller, Smith and Johnrose who are quite simply
not up to first division football, at least not in the positions they are playing in.
Money has to be spent, and I’m sure it will, but do we really want to go back to the
era of Waddle, where it appeared that he collected his players from some second class
auction. It is only right that we wait for the right players. It is imperative that, not
only has any player talent and ability, but also that they do not affect team morale in
the way that the signings of Carbone and Collymore so clearly did at Bradford.
Yesterday, I heard us described as an
‘aggressive’ crowd, very vociferous and loyal, but quick to turn if things
aren’t going right. Maybe people should turn their minds back to as little as two
years ago, then we really had something to moan about.
As we stand at the moment, it seems to me that the
supporters expectations are far outweighing the ability of the team. I have long believed
this season that we were playing above ourselves, that eventually we would be found out,
and that we would return to what we are: a newly promoted side who would be happy to
finish in mid table. Sadly, this may not be enough for ‘the best fans in the
country’.
