Room 101 - Clarets Nightmares
Some personal Betes Noire by Phil Whalley
John Bond
What self-respecting BFC Room 101 could be
complete without this tosspot? In justifying his decision to appoint Bond, our misguided
Chairman John Jackson revealed that Bond had demonstrated an impressive knowledge of our
football club at interview. We’ll probably never know what this knowledge actually
amounted to, but given his behaviour when he took over, it’s clear that he utterly
derided the family club ethos that had served Burnley so well.
The front page of the Burnley Express on Friday
15th May 1987 – the week after the Orient game – has a short
interview with none other than a 19 year-old Andy Payton, pictured in the colours of Hull
City. The Tigers had tried to sign Payton as a schoolboy, but the Padiham youngster had
unhesitatingly signed for the Clarets when the club belatedly made him an offer. Bond
proceeded to release him, and Hull gratefully snapped him up. In 1987, as the Clarets
nearly went out of the League, Payton won two Hull City Young Player of the Year awards.
According to the interview, Bond saw him play just once. Said Andy:
"We won that game 5-3. Bond watched and
I scored a hat-trick. Then we were called into Bond’s office to be told who he was
keeping and I was absolutely stunned by his decision. I had left school to take up
Burnley’s offer and didn’t have any other skills.
And other players have given similar testimony.
Chris Grimshaw, a young Claret from Accrington, recalled the day when Bond arrived at the
club:
"When he came he got rid of Billy
O’Rourke, Andy Wharton, Lee Dixon, Chris Curran, Kevin Young and myself. He’d
not even seen me play, he just wanted rid. I can definitely say that he never saw me play,
and there’s no doubt about it that it was the same for some of the other kids.
"I remember when he first came down to
Gawthorpe to give us all a talk. There used to be a bit of land near the gravel pitch we
called the cabbage patch, we used to play head tennis on it. He had us all sat down round
there, and soon as he started talking, I thought to myself, "He’s going to
change this club is this one." You know, big ideas. It had always been before that a
really friendly, family club. Frank Casper and Miller, they were always approachable.
"And I’ll never forget I was cleaning
the baths - I was only an apprentice - and he came in, never looked at us, and said,
swearing, "That’s not ******* good enough. Do it again." And from that day
on, the club changed totally. He brought all his own players in, and there were two
groups: all the Burnley players that had been there for some time, players like Martin
Dobson and Andy Wharton, and the likes of Gerry Gow and co. And there was friction -
really bad friction in training. And there were two dressing rooms at Gawthorpe, and the
old Man City boys used to go in one and everybody else would use the other.
"The Burnley boys who were there before
Bond used to all stick together - and you couldn’t blame them really, you could tell
that Bond wanted them all out and wanted his own men. And John Benson was his sidekick.
You know, it was horrible. To see people like Dobbo being treated the way he was treated -
they used to talk down to him in training in front of every player. I mean, he was a class
player wasn’t he? He didn’t need talking to like they did with him. I remember
that, it sticks in my mind does that.
"The man management was non-existent. Vince
Overson, Kevin Young and Dobbo - they seemed to have it in for them in particular. They
used to have a go for nothing really - Lawsy got it as well. They ruined that club."
One of the few youngsters to survive the Bond
regime, Ashley Hoskin, had turned down a guaranteed apprenticeship with Manchester City to
sign for Burnley. I asked Ashley how the club changed under Bond:
"Well, with being a local lad - I used
to go and watch them - the change was unbelievable. From being a family club and everyone
getting on, like Arthur Bellamy - superb, but he just became a different person. You know,
people become different people. And then there was George Bray - George was always
knocking about, but he wouldn’t come. You know, Bond had his own ways - Mr. Boss -
you’d to call him ‘Boss’. That was one of the first things he said -
"I’m the boss round here. Anyone who fails to call me boss..." Anyone not
unfastening their boot laces was fined. And it became so...it just wasn’t a family. I
know the apprentices I was with - Tony Woodworth, Sean Gotto and them - frightened to
death! Frightened to death of doing something wrong. And before it was a laugh. We went
down training with Arthur Bellamy and we’d stop in the afternoon and he’d help
to sweep up and stuff, and it was brilliant, like a big family. That went - it just
disappeared.
"When Arthur was there, we were top of the
Lancashire League, and we were buzzing. Everyone wanted to play for him. Arthur then got
put aside to doing a bit more of the groundsman work at Gawthorpe, and his coaching seemed
to go. He brought a fellow in called John Sainty. We had no respect for him, it just
changed. We were frightened of him, he’d never give you encouragement. If you did
well, he never said anything. He was effing and blinding - just no respect for him. We
were top of the league when he took over - this John Sainty - and I don’t think we
won another game. That’s true - that’s fact."
Lest we forget, Bond has always denied the
accusation that he had released these young talents without seeing them play or without
proper assessment. The man is a liar as well as a bully. Whilst he was at Shrewsbury, Bond
was the subject of a Radio Five interview in which he alleged that the Burnley crowd had
maliciously targeted him from the start. He claimed to have walked out for the first home
game of the season to a chorus of jeers. Again, the man is lying – I was there, and
whilst there might have been a few doubters giving him the bird, I can categorically state
that the vast majority of Clarets desperately wanted him and the club to succeed, and we
certainly weren’t calling for his head.
I’m prepared to admit that, on occasion, he
looked to have got the team playing. An extraordinary first-half display demolished Port
Vale, and a classic demonstration of wing play from Tommy Hutchinson was the key to an
exciting 2-1 victory at home to Sheffield United in one of those games that was a credit
to both sides. Although the Clarets displayed their usual defensive fragility away from
home, they went to Wimbledon in the midst of a good run and hammered the Dons 4-1. The
long-term injury to Kevin Reeves was a critical blow from which Bond’s Burnley could
not recover, and so it would be fair to say that Bond was unlucky in losing such an
important player at a pivotal moment of the season.
But none of this can hide the fact that he went
to a small town family club with precarious finances and signed his ageing cronies on
First Division wages – a morally bankrupt act of fiscal recklessness. An examination
of the club accounts from this period also reveals that Bond’s Wilmslow address was
somehow connected to the club’s finances. So, on top of his company car (a Rover was
returned – he insisted on a Mercedes), petrol for him and his wife and rumours of a
Florida holiday, did Bond also make Burnley pay his mortgage? I wouldn’t bet against
it.
An amusing tale from this period was related to
me by Dave Burnley. It was the morning of Boxing Day 1983, and Dave was cycling from his
Stoke home to Heald Green, where a lift to the Turf awaited for the holiday clash with
Bradford City. His route took him through Wilmslow, and there he had stopped at a zebra
crossing for a pedestrian. It was none other than John Bond, ambling across the road,
cigar in mouth, with two enormous Afghan hounds. As the manager approached, Dave greeted
him and asked if everything was OK for the afternoon. After the initial surprise of
Dave’s greeting, Bond regained his composure and blanked him – and this is how
I’d like to remember Bond. A hard-boiled spiv who enjoyed the lifestyle of the
successful at other people’s expense, and who held the decent and ordinary in such
contempt that he couldn’t even bring himself to acknowledge it.
All-seated Turf Moor
Smoke rolls in stinking, suffocating
wrack
On Shakespeare’s land, turning the green one black;
The crowds that once to harvest home would come
Hope for no harvest and possess no home,
While poor old tramps that liked a little ale,
In natural procession passed to jail;
Because the world must, like the tramp, move on,
There does not seem much else that can be done.
As Lord Vangelt said in the House of Peers:
‘None of us want reaction.’ (Tory cheers).
In his prime as Chairman of one of the most
successful teams in the land, Bob Lord was always keen to stress at every opportunity the
progressive and dynamic nature of Burnley Football Club. From apprentice to senior pro,
the players applied scientific principles to the art of football within training
facilities that were, quite literally, second to none. The paying spectator at Turf Moor
could expect to sit in comfort within heated stands and watch a team that played total
football long before the Dutch had thought of the term. Bob Lord held high position in the
Football League hierarchy, respected for his work at Burnley and resented somewhat for a
bluntness born of conceit and pride.
Yet even Bob Lord ended up presiding over a club
losing £8,000 a week, sliding down the Football League and with it’s famed youth
policy in tatters. And there we have the rub of progress – that even the most radical
of the vanguard nearly always end up outflanked, bewildered and embittered.
There used to be a football memorabilia shop on
Yorkshire Street. Called ‘The Football Fan’, it was run by a bloke called Tom
Gill, and, as the occasional treat, my Dad used to take me there before a home game. Tom
sold large sky-blue stickers, emblazoned in claret with slogans like "Stevo’s as
safe as Fort Knox". I bought one once that said, "Football is just a kick on the
Turf", a statement I wish was true but whose wisdom football has, these days, chosen
to disregard. I sometimes feel as though I want nothing to do with the all-seater ethos,
and, like the character in Subterranean Homesick Alien, want to be shown the world
as I’d love to see it: not the stands or the corporate boxes, just that patch of
grass where our heroes of past and present have done what really matters – simply
played football.
A friend of mine is writing a book about Glasgow
social culture, and one day he went along to Parkhead, a short walk from his place of
work. Standing on a small hill near the ground, he discovered that just a few hundred
yards beyond the ground lay a council estate, profoundly deprived, from which generations
of passionate Celtic supporters had been raised. It was in such conditions that the famous
Lisbon Lions – all Glaswegians – had grown up and found together that
indomitable spirit. But today’s generation, still die-hard Celtic and all dying to
roar on the Buoys, find themselves sitting at home instead, priced out of the game.
I wonder how many ex-Longsiders this situation
applies to? More than we might think, I suspect. For these are the crowds in the sonnet
extract above. Crowds that to harvest home would come – the crowds of working men
that would reap a small reward for a hard week’s graft – a Saturday afternoon
within the brotherhood of the Longside. And the Longside would remind them, as it reminded
me, of a home. Dark corners giving way to lovingly scruffy spaces. The familiarity of
nicotine pushing through whitewash. Today’s all-seated Turf Moor is about as
welcoming as the gleaming lobby of an exclusive hotel.
OK, I didn’t particularly enjoy pissing
against a breeze block wall and having the wind blow it all back on me. Neither did I
appreciate having to try and watch a game peering through fences or wire netting. This
isn’t an argument against decent facilities, nor is it a nostalgia trip. Nostalgia is
nothing more than the flip side of progress. Nostalgia is hopeless – it’s a sure
indication that the world has changed irrevocably, that there’s no going back. Sure,
I’d like to see the return of safe terraces, but it’s not going to happen.
But other things could still be fair game: the
reunification of the four divisions – the old community of the Football League –
and an end to the divisiveness of the present system. I want to see that cankerous
Australian/American Murdoch out of our game, out of something precious for which he
wouldn’t care a jot if it didn’t provide him with profit and power. And who
could argue against the return of prices that didn’t exclude the unemployed or the
low-waged? Also, while we’re at it, how about drawing a line under the best attempts
of the elite of both political parties to change the game for the worse, sickening
individuals like Moynihan, Evans and Mellor. In the face of the Tory cheers that greeted
the Taylor Report and all its consequences, I’m happy to be a reactionary.
One more thing. I really like Mark Lamarr. If
anyone wants proof positive that the power to put things on agendas and change the
consciousness of people lies with the middle class intelligentsia that edit the media,
then football is a classic case study that does Gramsci proud. So, in the midst of an
ideological onslaught that compels even Melvyn Bragg to declare an affiliation (Carlisle
United, for Christ’s sake), I’d like to raise a glass to Mr Lamarr. He’s
been one of the few of that crowd who has resisted, even going so far as to say that
football is pointless and boring. I don’t agree with you, O great quiffed one, but
thanks for having the honesty to say it. As for the rest – Jack Straw? Do me a
favour! Him and Blackburn Rovers deserve each other. They’re both fake.
Clarets who applaud
opposition goals
As a Claret scribe once memorably wrote in Marlon’s
Gloves, being a football fan by and large entails having late summer hope slowly and
mercilessly hammered out of you until, eight months later, you are released, a
disillusioned shell of the person you were the previous August. It’s only when you
reach that unhappy state of being – when you know for sure that a game or a
season’s aspiration has been truly lost – that, to me, it seems OK to applaud an
opposition score, and only then if it’s a peach of a goal, of course. And, when the
heat of battle has faded, occasionally the opposition do deserve your recognition for a
good job well and fairly done, as did non-league Runcorn who were applauded off the Turf
in 1980 having battled mightily for a 0-0 draw.
And sometimes this gesture can be genuinely
heart-warming, like the ovation given by 40,000 Clarets to Steve Bull at Wembley in 1988,
as the Wolves team came round to the Burnley end on their lap of honour. The ovation was,
incidentally, reciprocated by a man who could clearly appreciate the passion of fans for a
great club struggling hard against the forces of history.
In addition, it’s always good to be on the
receiving end of such magnanimous deeds. Frank Clark will always have my respect for his
reaction to the defeat of his team on that Claret D-day of 9th May 1987.
Burnley’s victory had removed his side from a position in the Fourth Division
play-offs, and yet the north-easterner obviously understood that what had been saved that
day was of a greater significance:
"I never liked the idea of the bottom
club in the Fourth Division going out without even a chance of a play-off. Just look at
this ground. It’s magnificent, and yet this great old club had one foot in the
trapdoor when we began this game. What a sight, wasn’t it, to see nearly 18,000
packed into this great stadium?"
However, I draw a line in the sands of
mutual admiration, along with, I suspect, most other Clarets. Who can, in the midst of
that gut-wrenching moment when the enemy have snatched three points and are cavorting in
rhapsody, find it in themselves to applaud? It happened just the other night at
Gillingham when our defence granted Asaba the freedom of Kent and he put our promotion
rivals 2-1 up with only a short time left to play. Some lily-livered specimen near me gave
a couple of half-hearted claps and went, "Well, it were a good goal, it deserves to
win the game."
There was arguably a soupçon of truth to that
statement, but it beggars belief that someone calling himself a Claret could actually say
it at the very moment the other half of the ground was on its feet celebrating our demise.
Even one of the best opposition winners I can remember – a peach of a cross met with
a spectacular and unstoppable header at Shrewsbury in 1997 – didn’t even begin
to compensate for the inevitable embrace of that crushing grip of despair.
That April night, Shrewsbury’s last-minute
winner ended our promotion hopes, and at a party in the German town of Luneburg the
following August, I met a Shrews fan who had been there himself. "That was our best
performance for four years," he told me, "and our winner was superb." I
concurred that it had indeed been a superb goal, and began to feel a little better about
that defeat. Until he added, "Still, it did us no good. We were shite after that game
and we still went down."
Derek Scott’s miss at
Anfield
Allegedly, history fellows at dinner parties
like nothing better than to play the "What if?" game. Someone raises a
historical event of epochal significance, offers a ‘what if?’ scenario, and then
sits back with the raspberries and crème fraîche as a debate ensues with the intensity
that only narcissistic academics can muster. Just imagine, when Gordon Brown loses a snap
election to Michael Portillo in 2005, future academics will say "What if Portillo had
not lost his seat to a fellow homosexual in 1997?" I’m sure you get my drift.
I’d quite like to ask the ‘What
if?’ question about the aforesaid incident at Anfield in 1983. For those unaware,
here’s the background: League Cup semi-final, 1st leg. Liverpool, soon to
be League and European Champions, versus Burnley, soon to be relegated to the Third
Division. Liverpool are in their glorious heyday – Grobbelaar, Hansen, Lawrenson,
Souness, Dalglish, Rush – the team oozes class. The Clarets are bumping along the
bottom of the Second Division. A pre-season decision to sign no defensive cover has reaped
a disastrous crop of away defeats and home draws, Burnley almost invariably unable to keep
the opposition out. No contest? Don’t you believe it!
An even start gave way to drama when our
long-serving midfielder Derek Scott was put clean through on goal. With only Grobbelaar to
beat, he fluffed his lines badly, shooting straight at the Liverpool keeper. That was
frustrating enough. But there was worse to come for the thousands of Clarets squeezed onto
the away terrace.
With the travelling Clarets immediately to his
right, Scott regained possession and chose to run at the Liverpool defence. He got past
Lawrenson and this time, instead of shooting, had the presence to take the ball round
Grobbelaar as well. The massed ranks of Clarets inhaled deeply with the expectation that
they were about to witness Burnley taking the lead in a Cup semi-final at Anfield. The
awesome Kop stood in the distance, silent and unbelieving. It had to be a goal. Facing an
open goal at a comfortable angle, Scott struck the ball.
He put it wide.
Immediately after his first effort – the
one he had driven straight at Grobbelaar – I had wondered about the pandemonium that
would occur if Burnley were to score that night. We were packed in so tightly that it
seemed impossible that someone would not get hurt in such a melee. As Scott rounded
Grobbelaar, a gleeful electricity swept through us, the anticipation of knowing that
joyous hell is about to break loose. I have, to this day, never seen Burnley score at
Anfield. I was there in February 1979 - my first quite literally breathtaking ‘big
crowd’ occasion - when nearly 50,000 attended an evening F.A Cup 5th round
tie. That night, two stupendous Ray Clemence saves prevented Peter Noble giving the
Clarets the lead. That was fair enough - Clemence was a world-class keeper and that’s
what world-class keepers do. And to be fair to Derek Scott, his worth to the Burnley team
was measured in the currency of endeavour, not goals. But he should have scored. He should
have given me a scent of that Elysian field, a chance to dream the unimaginable.
For who could say that Burnley would not have
gone on to Wembley that season if Scott had taken his chance? Despite poor League form,
the Clarets had battled through five rounds of the League Cup, defeating three First
Division teams (two away from home) and scoring twenty-one goals in the process. It was
the form of a team whose name was, however incongruously, on the Cup. In the Final,
Burnley would have met an off-the-boil Manchester United. I’m sure that our World Cup
striker Billy Hamilton would have had no bother popping a couple past Gary Bailey, and
Trevor Steven would have emerged as the world-class midfielder that he genuinely was.
To bring the article full-circle, it was the
relegation that season that precipitated the reign of John Bond. That all was not well
under the Cheshire commuter was plain to see as the Clarets went in search of League Cup
glory once more. Bond’s Burnley fell spectacularly at the first hurdle as Fourth
Division Crewe tore the Clarets apart at Turf Moor. By half time of the second leg, they
led the tie by five clear goals. This truly pathetic display came just seven months after
that clash at Anfield where Burnley had thrilled us all by taking on the best in Europe
and so nearly prevailing.
Phil Whalley
May 2000
