Once upon a time the Clarets used to play their games
on a Saturday. In those same days England played their international matches on a
Wednesday and they would never play those nasty tartan people who wore sweaty socks and
for whom one sniff of alcohol rendered them incapable of constructing a sentence any
longer than two words of one syllable (neither of which could be delivered in a
comprehensible manner).
One weekend in November all this changed.
The occasion was Woody’s 40th Birthday. A number of
intrepid travellers headed for a weekend in Burnley, planning to take in Burnley’s
Saturday home match with Blackpool, a small ‘party’ on Saturday evening and
return home on the 4.40pm train from Leeds the following day.
It all seemed relatively simple until… England failed to
qualify for Euro 2000 but would play-off for the privilege of qualification. The play-off
draw was made and as a result some imbecile decided to play the first leg that Saturday
afternoon at 2 o clock!!! The League programme was decimated. After some considerable
thought Burnley and Blackpool decided to make the best of a bad deal and play their game
the following day at 1 o clock.
Our plans were thrown into chaos.
A revised plan was drawn up which involved two taxis from the
‘company’ based behind the Shalamar and directed opposite the Sparrow Hawk. We
told them we would be leaving 3.15pm sharp, and emphasized that we must leave no later
than 3.15pm in order to make our train.
On the day we were all ready at 3.05pm, sadly our cabs were not. One
cab had gone to get petrol! Whilst the other had to wait for the first to return! This in
the middle of the traffic dispersing from a nearby football match. The second cab returned
at 3.25pm and immediately six of our number began their journey to Leeds – a journey
completed with just minutes to spare.
And so to the other cab, and our famous five travellers. We had to
wait for our driver to lock up. Then he set off just as the police decided to introduce a
traffic control point at the junction of Church Road and Ormerod Road. The delay was too
great to make up. Coupled with the fact that neither cab was road worthy (local licensing
authority please note), the speedometer and parts of the rest of the controls on the
dashboard were inoperative. This meant the driver couldn’t trust how fast he was
going so we crawled all the way to Leeds. We arrived ten minutes too late.
Fortunately Woody came up trumps. He had made the train but passed
our tickets onto Lee Firmin who was waiting for a later train to Birmingham. Now armed
with our tickets the five of us headed for the GNER Customer Services office to try to
negotiate our way onto the next train to London. Thanks to GNER’s top team at Leeds
and a sympathetic guard we were allowed to board the 5.40 train and returned only an hour
late.
We learnt a number of salutary lessons:
1) Which taxi firm in Burnley never to trust again (on either time
or safety grounds).
2) GNER Customer Services are brilliant.
3) Honesty is the best policy to persuade a train company of your
predicament.
4) The F.A. have no concept of the difficulties supporters (or
Clubs) have in reorganising plans at short notice. If there was a way of taking them to a
tribunal for bringing the game into disrepute someone should do it… and soon.
