They disgraced
the name of Burnley
Hall of Infamy No. 2
Paul Stewart
Although he only
‘played’ in six games for Burnley, Paul Stewart’s status in the Clarets
Hall of Infamy has long been assured. Such were the depths he plumbed in that short period
on loan from the once-mighty Liverpool that his name is often put forward at the advanced
stages of selection for the Worst Ever Clarets XI. Perhaps only Mark Kendall (see last
issue) could rival him for making such a lasting impression in such a short space of time.
Sadly, it needn’t have been this way. We all
really wanted to like him. We wanted him to be good. Honestly we did. Arriving when he
did, amid the despair of our desperately poor ‘fight’ against relegation from
the first division, he looked as though he might just be the hero to halt our slide. Paul
Stewart riding to our rescue: it sounds ridiculous now, and of course it was, but at the
time that’s how it seemed. I remember turning up for the first game after he had
joined us and holding serious conversations about the affect he might have on the team. As
it happened, he was injured that day and unable to play. Good start, eh? Maybe that should
have given us some inkling of what was to come.
So perhaps we overburdened him with expectations? Could
it be that we simply hoped for too much from this never great player, and were more
disappointed than we had right to be when he so conspicuously failed to deliver? Hang on,
that sounds like reasoned argument, and this is Hall of Infamy where bile and bitterness
rule. Let us not pretend that this is a fair debate about the merits or otherwise of a
former player. This is character assassination. But with Stewart, there is so little left
for an assassin to aim at that it hardly seems worth it. He comprehensively did the job
himself. There are only so many times a ‘footballer’ can shoot himself in both
feet.
Besides, any attempt at reasoned argument is smashed
upon the rock of one hard fact: he was an absolutely useless player. And you should have
seen that sentence before I took the obscenities out. I believe this fact to be
universally acknowledged, such that I need not waste time on establishing it. Even the Clarets
Collection, that worthy apologist for scores of useless Clarets, records that he
"did little to help the Burnley cause." Coming from these ever-forgiving pages,
this is tantamount to calling for Stewart’s immediate tarring and feathering, then
leading him through the streets of Burnley and encouraging children to throw rotten fruit
at him. (Hey, now there’s a thought.) Unfortunately, they go on to add that Stewart
"never found his real form at Burnley." On the contrary, I contend that he did.
Stewart always was a journeyman pro who somehow got
lucky. It was just unfortunate that his journey brought him to us. His early years at
Blackpool were typical. He was a run of the mill lower division targetman. It doesn’t
take much effort to imagine him, probably clad in slacks and an ill-fitting shirt,
clutching a pint of fizzy lager while chatting up the talent in one of that resort’s
many insalubrious nightclubs. This was his world. Somehow, by some act of chance, he got
promoted beyond it. He went to Man City, then found himself in a Spurs team which was
actually pretty good. Somewhere along the way he stopped being a striker and became a
midfielder. This is the classic hallmark of a player who isn’t good enough; they get
moved back. In one game Spurs had two players sent off but hung on for a result. Stewart
rolled his sleeves up and got stuck in. Hard to imagine, I know, but there is video
evidence. This was the making of him. He had now acquired a reputation as an industrious
midfielder.
That was the zenith of Paul Stewart’s career. He
would get favourable write-ups from broadsheet football writers intent upon bringing
mystification to an essentially simple game. They would try to convince us that they saw
something we could not. I hope the experience of chris waddle has taught us not to ever
believe such hype. Around this time, Stewart was somehow handed a couple of England caps.
This was getting beyond a joke. He also earned a transfer to Liverpool. This said more
about the decline of a once mighty club than anything else. No one looked more ridiculous
in the all-red than he. Liverpool, once a club renowned for good housekeeping and
judicious talent-spotting, had started on their crack new strategy or recruiting expensive
mediocre players, then realising instantly that they didn’t want them and spending
the rest of their contracts trying to get rid. Graeme Souness as a manager was always
guilty of believing he could make flawed players good just by wishing them so. He never
learned. Paul Ince’s career proves that Liverpool learned nothing either. Here,
Stewart got found out pretty quickly.
It was from Liverpool that we, of course, took him on
loan. We’d really hit the skids then, mired in a two month beaten run that ultimately
sealed our fate. I couldn’t blame Mullen for gambling. He’d done dafter stuff
than that. There was giving John Deary and Andy Farrell away for one. These two stalwarts
from the fourth division days, one a combative midfield warhorse, the other a versatile
everyman, had been summarily dispensed with. Losing Deary had seemed particularly less
than a masterstroke. Perhaps the only Burnley player of the decade to consistently link
defence and attack, Deary’s combination of ceaseless enthusiasm and sheer brute force
had played an important part in our unexpected elevation. Mullen announced that both deals
were "in the best long term interests of the club." Unfortunately, in the short
term we went down, and in the long term stayed there. (Aren’t relegation battles best
fought in the short term?) In the long term, we still haven’t replaced Deary, the
less than useful Micky Mellon being the latest one to fail the challenge.
Into the dog’s breakfast that our club had become
ambled Paul Stewart. And he was hopeless. I mean really, abjectly, pointlessly, stupidly
useless. If our expectations had been too high, he quickly set about shattering them. It
was the only thing he did quickly. By now Stewart was overweight, out of shape and playing
as though perennially short of breath. He puffed about the pitch conspicuously failing to
get involved with play. The only thing he was any good for was getting booked. I think of
his six games there was one where the referee didn’t take his name, but I may be
wrong.
One of the things you need when fighting relegation,
apart from a few decent players and some tactics (damn, we were always up against it) is
of course good team spirit. You need players who’re prepared to fight for each other
until the bitter end, who never say die. Paul Stewart’s affect on team morale was
disastrous. Here was a man who was out-earning anyone else at the club by a substantial
margin, parachuted in from outside and failing to do anything as mundane as pull his
weight. Rumours of Stewart’s unpopularity with the squad spread quickly. As early as
his second match for us, players would refuse to pass to him. True, he rarely managed to
manoeuvre his bulk into the sort of position where a pass might be useful, and we
couldn’t work out if his failure to pass in return was down to reciprocal sulking or
fundamental inability, but this was hardly the tonic a struggling team needed.
The nadir came on that mad night at Barnsley, where
Kevin Lynch, the referee from hell, decided we really had hung around this division too
long and it was time we were off. Stewart was one of two Clarets sent off that night. Was
it for either of his stock in trades, mouthing off or lunging? I don’t know and it
doesn’t matter. A player brought in on high wages and with a stack of experience had
contributed nothing to the cause of our struggling club. Worse, he had done us damage.
It’s always unforgivable when someone on loan gets themselves sent off. They’re
doing it in our time at our expense. When the season ended and we were hauled before the
FA for our record-breakingly bad disciplinary record, he was part of it.
After that, he left. Even Mullen couldn’t see the
point in keeping him around when he couldn’t play. In six games he had scored no
goals, had provided no assists, had done nothing. The cost of his wages was reputed to
have been £20,000: the exact transfer fee we had received for John Deary. The only thing
he had earned was a suspension.
What was left for him was a one way ticket to
obscurity. He stopped at Su’lan’ for a bit, and even got some good headlines. I
wouldn’t believe a word of it. We weren’t going to be fooled like that again. He
briefly passed through Stoke to experience another taste of relegation. It was there that
he achieved a perhaps unique accolade. As noted previously, a
‘Four Four Two’ magazine survey revealed that he was the most hated player
ever – at two different clubs. The fans of Liverpool and Stoke showed that they
couldn’t be fooled. I would always have put him ahead of the Burnley choice, Nick
Pickering. Pickering was a lousy player, but at least he was comic. The circumstances of
his short and pointless Burnley career were surely amusing. Whereas Paul Stewart was a
villain in a bitter, miserable, truly gut-wrenching season of relegation trauma. No
contest, I’d have thought.
If you look at the path of his career, it’s a
who’s who of clubs well know for making bad expensive signings. Coincidence?
The last I heard of him, the downward spiral of his
career had taken him to the non-league. No respectable conference level, either: he was
earning a crust plying his dubious trade for Workington in the Unibond division something.
Perhaps here he learned some humility. He might have shed some of that waddlesque refusal
to comprehend that anything might have been his fault. (When he left, he wished us well
and hoped we would avoid relegation, as if his all round lack of commitment hadn’t
endeared himself to the faithful enough.) Perhaps he could even be bloody arsed when he
turned out for them. For us, he was a waste of space, a waste of money, a waste of time,
even. Just a waste.
And I haven’t even mentioned his hair.
Firmo
September-October 1999
