What is
rarely remembered about this game is that it should have had no significance at all. This
match never should have been played on 28 April. It had first been scheduled for 10 March.
At the time I was busy wasting two years of my life
working as the lowliest of low civil service drones at Nelson Archives. (I had emerged
from University with a not very good degree in the midst of the leanest year of the
Nineties, tried to become employed in a half-hearted way, and ended up there.) The game
was always planned as a night match. I'd shot out of work as soon as flexi-time would
allow and raced home. I think the plan was to catch the supporter's coach from Nelson bus
station along with my brother. As soon as I got home they told me that the match was off.
What had happened was that a young apprentice, Ben Lee,
had climbed onto the roof of the Longside to retrieve a ball kicked there in an England v
Wales schoolboy match a couple of weeks before, but had fallen through, and died on the
terrace below. It was an awful thing to imagine. We'd even been at that schoolboy match,
because we had nothing else to do. It was meaningless and boring. Who'd have thought that
it could result in a young man losing his life? And on the Longside too. The next time on
we looked up, and you could see the huge hole in the roof, which had been hastily
repaired.
In the circumstances, of course the match was called
off. We couldn't have dreamt its later significance.
Even then, it nearly wasn't that big a deal at all.
These things are arbitrary. It could have been some other game. Although we had one or two
slips on the way, like losing 3-0 at Gillingham and letting Scarborough hold us to a draw
at home, after the splendid 3-1 win over Cardiff it had become hard to imagine even we
could blow it so comprehensively as to miss out on promotion. There was always that golden
rule which reads ‘But This Is Burnley’ to consider, but we’d have to go
some to chuck away all our good work. The main worry became the championship. Rotherham
were still contenders.
In circumstances like these, no decisions needed to be
taken. It simply becomes a case of going to every game for the rest of the season, so you
can be able to say you were there when it was clinched.
Carlisle could have been the one. On an odd day when we
swamped Brunton Park with an unlikely combination of zany fancy dress and Seventies crowd
violence, we only produced an unsatisfactory draw. This meant we were kind of up, barring
extraordinary circumstances, such as if everyone else won and scored bags of goals. And we
still had three games left to make sure: York on Tuesday, Rochdale on Thursday and, if we
really cocked up, our insurance policy of Wrexham at home on the Saturday.
So, no pressure. Three games left. One win needed. And
then everyone else could do what they wanted and they couldn’t touch us. But for me,
we had to do it at York. A long-standing social commitment in Leeds on Thursday meant
there was no way I could go to the match at Rochdale. After going to more games this
season than any other, including that blasted Rochdale thing the first time when it was
rained off at two o’clock, I couldn’t bear the thought of missing the clincher.
It was not a productive day at work. Again, I left at
the earliest.
Ludicrous though it might seem now, this was not an all
ticket match. It was quite rare to get them in what was then the fourth division. Carlisle
had been pay on the day too, with the effect that they’d compressed the home fans
into a smaller and smaller space to let us all in, then, when it all got too much for
them, declared a gate of a suspiciously round 10,000.
As our coach hit traffic and slowed to a crawl still
miles from York, we started to worry. There was every prospect of missing the kick off. It
was a frustrating ride. There was little conversation. I just kept looking out of the
window. Where were we? Christ, was this Harrogate? How could it possibly take so long?
Of course, we know now that the reason why traffic was
so heavy is that something like 5,000 Clarets were descending on Bootham Crescent, most of
them coming from this same direction. It was probably a good thing I didn’t know this
at the time. I’d only have become convinced that we’d never get in.
When we finally arrived, there was a queue stretching
to the end of the street and then some. Stoically, we joined it. People took photographs
of the queue. TV was there too. Anticipating the cameras, some blokes had brought a banner
carrying the words ‘Kenny and his millions – staying down together’, and
they therefore achieved immense popularity. (Sadly, it turned out to be untrue, and a
couple of weeks later, the fly that is Blackburn landed squat in the ointment to end the
party, when a combination of cheating and sheer jaminess catapulted their expensive side
of mercenaries temporarily into the premier league.)
Somehow news filtered back that the kick off had been
delayed. Smart move. Everyone relaxed. We filed forward with some hope of seeing the game.
They sold us a programme. It was for the original fixture, with a cheap insert stuck in.
I suppose everyone got in who wanted to? I never heard
any stories of people being locked out. Like any small club looking at a windfall, York
were loath to turn ready cash away. They found themselves as adept at squeezing Clarets
into previously neglected corners as Burnley fans were in infiltrating home parts of the
ground. Thankfully, the North Yorkshire police were ridiculously tolerant, even enjoying a
bit of banter with the crowd.
Everyone remembers the people on the roof. A small
flat-roofed hut in one corner of the ground looked like a perfect vantage point for a
bunch of latecomers. Eventually the police coaxed them down to the amusement of all.
It was shortly after eight when the game kicked off. I
was pleased to note we were playing in our away kit of yellow. Our home shirts that season
were these weird purple numbers covered in specks of pigeon shit white, which from a
distance resembled crucifixes. It was typical Burnley to get stuck with such crappy shirts
in such a season of rare triumph.
Unfortunately, it quickly became obvious that nerves
had got to the players even more than they had got to us. York had the better of the first
half. The swagger with which we had taken apart Cardiff was gone. This flamboyantly
attacking side suddenly couldn’t get its well-rehearsed moves together. On the
terraces the party atmosphere dissipated and was replaced by a creeping edginess. We
couldn’t blow it yet, could we?
Their goal was scrappy and undeserved. McCarthy hit a
shot, goalkeeper Williams didn’t hold it, Blackstone put the rebound in. It was just
before half time. What can I remember of it, apart from that? Nothing. Can I remember
anything from the first half? No, just the feeling of rising tension and creeping
disappointment, crammed into that overfull terrace, straining for a view of a game that
wasn’t going our way.
David Williams, by the way, was our fifth goalkeeper of
the season, and one with the unique distinction of having played against us while out on
loan at Rochdale earlier in the year, in a league match when actual points were at stake.
Then he had performed brilliantly to help them to a win. Frank Casper never was the
sharpest tool in the box.
At least we emerged for the second half full of greater
purpose. Jimmy Mullen, our then inspirational manager who had done so much to turn this
unlikely side into a team of winners, later revealed that he’d told them to just go
out and give it a go. We gave it a go. We started to exert the kind of relentless
attacking pressure we had seen at many an away ground. Mike Conroy was at the heart of
everything, making play and taking shots. There was a penalty we could have had too.
We quickly developed a dislike for their goalkeeper
Dean Kiely, which meant both we and he must have been doing something right. Thankfully,
he was at fault for the equaliser.
I'd like to pretend that I remembered our goals with
absolute clarity. After all, it was one of the most important Burnley matches of all time,
and so the two goals we scored should be burned upon my memory. But that would be lying.
The truth is, I can't remember a damned thing about them, and this is as far as I got
before having to watch the video produced from that season, Burnley Are Back, a hastily
slung together collection of clips assembled by Granada and narrated by Clive Tyldsley. It
naturally features the goals from this match, at the start and again near the end.
John Pender headed the ball to Conroy, who
intelligently punted it for Robbie Painter to chase. Kiely came out, but with Painter
pressing, missed it. Painter, scorer of the fastest Burnley goal of all time (possibly)
raced after it towards goal. He attempted the world’s lowest header, and as the ball
fell free, John Deary thundered in to his left and crashed it in without thought. An hour
gone, 1-1, and suddenly we were back on track.
How fitting that John Steele Deary (the middle name was
always appropriate) was the man to score it. A colossal player, he was more than the
midfield hard man he was typified as, although he was that too. He was a box to box
midfielder, capable of getting back to defend then charging up in support of attack, as he
did here. Although some people didn’t rate him, it was noticeable how we never looked
the same team when he was absent through injury and suspension. While not captain, he led
the team by sheer force of personality. On the video footage of this night he can clearly
be seen after York’s goal telling the team that it was only one goal, not allowing
anyone to let his head drop.
He was, of course, also a hard bastard. He proved that
again here. Kiely, clearly annoyed at his own mistake, kicked out at Painter running to
celebrate. Deary immediately abandoned his goal celebration to concentrate on attempting
to persuade Kiely of the error of his ways by means of gentle pressure applied to the
neck. He grabbed Kiely and swung him round into the back of the goal. As everyone else
went mad, Kiely and Deary were joined in the net by the referee, who showed leniency
appropriate to the occasion with a yellow card. The scorer of the goal had been booked for
attempting to strangle the opposition goalkeeper. Truly, this side had team spirit in
abundance.
Would a point be enough? Yes and no. Although the voice
of Clive Tyldsley says so on the video, in the commentary that leads up to John
Francis’ climactic winner, he’s being wise after the event; his commentary was
dubbed on afterwards when they put the video together.
I have most of that season’s goals taped from
various low quality Granada programmes, and the commentary on many differs to that on the
tape. I couldn’t help being disappointed when I first saw that video. Somehow history
seemed to have been tampered with. The goals just didn’t seem right. That said, the
video quickly became an essential souvenir of the one season in recent years when Burnley
had class and flair and style match after match. Who could be without it? At the flat of
two Burnley fans who’d shacked up I spied twin copies of the video side by side on
the shelf. I watched it at a friend’s house at about three o’clock one New
Year’s morning. What better way to see in another year? I consulted mine to write
this. (I’d have preferred a tape of the whole match, but I never saw one.) My copy,
incidentally, is autographed by Captain John Pender (The Defender) with best birthday
wishes; he was doing a signing session in Burnley WH Smith’s around the time of my
birthday. As he signed, the video screen above his head played a loving replay of his own
goal for Scunthorpe.
Anyway, as we’d sort of gone up against Carlisle,
a point would certainly have put the final seal on our promotion. But now we were greedy.
We wanted the title. And of course, I wanted it now.
More Burnley pressure came to nothing, and our watches
couldn’t hide from us the fact that time was running out. Did I honestly have to go
to this thing on Thursday? Couldn’t I fall suddenly and conveniently ill? I still had
my ticket for Rochdale somewhere.
In injury time it happened. Why describe a goal that
everyone has surely seen? But to complete the record, Joe Jakub, known as Cabbage in an
earlier life but by now a player we had come to sort of respect, if not like, cleared an
aimless York ball out of defence to Mike Conroy. Conroy was the season’s undisputed
hero up to this point. A cheap and obscure summer signing from Reading, he had led the
line brilliantly, scoring twenty odd league goals and endearing himself to the faithful by
his tendency to leap jubilantly on away end fences at any opportunity. He could play a
bit, too. He did so now. Just over the half way line, he brilliantly spun away from his
opponent, and ran into the penalty area on the left, always just ahead of their defender.
John Francis was running full pelt into the box. Conroy played the ball across low and
hard. The rest is history.
I didn’t actually see the ball hit the back of the
net. I’m not sure anyone did. We saw it heading in and the terrace fell apart. There
was a mad rush down to the front. Everyone ended up in a different place from where they
started. It was all that makes football the world’s only great game. If you ever
wanted any justification for all the sentimentality of football, it was here. If you
haven’t hugged half a dozen total strangers in quick succession, you haven’t
lived. We were jubilant. It was insane.
The video inserts a note of reality. It is often
described as a crap goal. A bit harsh, this, as the build up was good, even if the finish
wouldn’t have scored highly for artistic impression. But football is a
results-oriented game. It isn’t bloody ice dancing. It bounced in of some part of
John Francis’ leg. Possibly a thigh. It went in. that’s enough.
I always loved John Francis. He had his critics. They
said he couldn’t control a ball. They said he couldn’t run with it. They had a
point, but he was fast and direct and exciting to watch and he came to us at a time when
we’d grown used to seeing cynical, lazy-arsed, moribund footballers eking out their
talents at the end of their careers or nice but crap non-leaguers who’d somehow come
to stay in the professional league for a year or so. Put the ball in front of Francis, let
him run after it like a greyhound after a hare and watch defenders shit themselves.
Sometimes he ‘controlled’ it out of touch. Sometimes he shot and it went in. It
was worth playing the odds. We didn’t often play to his strengths. When we did, like
at Plymouth two years later, he could be devastating. What that brace, and this winner at
York also proved was, despite the fact that he was clearly a bag of nerves as he bundled
the ball in, he somehow had the knack of being a player for the big occasion.
He was also well built and powerful looking: a scary
man to have running towards you. Although apparently a nice guy off the pitch, he was
nicknamed ‘The Beast’. And if it went in off his thigh, that was fair enough; it
would have come off one of those huge leg muscles that enabled him to run so fast.
Also immortalised in this moment were the Chesterfield
Clarets, who were smart enough to get there early down the front. Their flag right behind
the goal is unmissably at the centre of every photograph.
The game was over, and as they performed the ritual of
the token kick off, the gathered had but one aim: to get on that pitch. Seconds later, we
duly poured on. The sensible police didn’t try to stop us. Those quick off the mark
got to grab souvenirs and chair our heroes from the pitch. Somewhere above the crowd I saw
John Deary being carried. I, always cautious, but as ever determined to get on the pitch
if at all possible, waited for good numbers to tread turf before I followed in their wake.
The smell of the mud and the unevenness of the surface were the two things that struck me.
The vanguard had raced to the tunnel, and me and my brother ambled over to join them.
Of course, at the time we couldn’t see it, but the
video underlines the territorial dominance of our support: Clarets fans poured on from all
four sides of the pitch.
We danced and sung. ‘Championes’, a chant
which was to become familiar, got its first airing that night. ‘Jimmy Mullen’s
Claret and Blue Army’ was naturally done long and loud. It was a proper tribute to
the man’s inspirational management. He had instilled tremendous self belief into his
charges. These were players who, in the main, had had unexceptional careers in the lower
divisions, with few highlights and little success. Most of them didn’t go on to do
anything when they left. Yet under Mullen, they were moulded into an exceptional side,
which made the most of what talent players had and combined it with a ferocious will to
compete. This season still remains the only one in which I consistently enjoyed my
football.
Much backpatting, handshaking and hugging of unknown
people went on too. (It occasionally occurs to me, as I brush past some Claret I
don’t know on the way to the ground or in the pub, were they on the pitch that night
at York? Did we share the celebrations?) In that mass of people, we were there, somewhere.
Eventually, other chants gave way to one of ‘Bring on the Champions’.
Up in the middle of the main stand around which we
clustered, in the Director’s Box, something was stirring. The players, most of them
shirtless, orchestrated by Conroy, had emerged to lead the singing. Normal roles were
reversed. They were up in the stand, leaning over precariously, fists in the air; we were
on the pitch, looking up. But we were singing the same songs, stemming from a shared
euphoria. It was one of those rare moments when the cynicism of the game was transcended,
and it felt that us and the players were united in the same cause.
How long this went on I do not know. We seemed to be on
the pitch for ages. I remember thinking what a mess we’d made of it. It was a churned
field of mud dotted everywhere with zigzag trainer prints. I felt a bit bad about this,
and hoped that they didn’t have to play there again this season. They might have made
a few quid out of us that night, but they’d have to spend some of it on that pitch.
The journey home was actually quite subdued. I hate
those football coaches anyway. You get no sense of travelling anywhere, and the atmosphere
tends to be a blanded-out version of what you might normally experience. Those journeys
smooth out football’s highs and lows into flat homogeneity, and this is never to be
encouraged. We sat quietly, isolated, looking out of the window, waving at people (there
were so many coaches it was something of a convoy, and people came to watch them all go
by). I was in a little self-contained bubble of happiness. I tried to let it sink in that
we would no longer be of this division. We would play in a division that wouldn’t be
the lowest. For people who’d got into Burnley in the 1980’s, it was hard to
imagine we would ever be anything other than a crap side stuck in the fourth division.
That was all we had known and I had assumed it was permanent. It took seven years to
escape. Clearly, this would take some amount of getting used to.
Although it’s often associated with our play off
success of two years later, and the way it returned to haunt us the year after, this was
the first time I heard people sing ‘Burnley are back’.
When I got home everyone had gone to bed. The only
thing I could find to drink was rum, which I didn’t drink, so I poured out a few
generous measures. The next day I woke up Radio Lancashire coverage of the result and
subsequent festivities. I occasionally fish out the tapes I made of these for comfort in
the face of very bad results. Both local tv news programmes covered it, and I have those
videos too. It seems that Burnley was a ghost town for much of the night, bursting back to
life with a vengeance later as people returned. Memorably, it was reported that local
amateur dramatic performances were interrupted to report the news. The whole town waited
on the score.
Not much work was done that day either. It was all
everyone at work wanted to talk about. Those who were there walked around with dazed and
happy faces before knocking off early. Nothing could touch us today. Soon people would
have to start pretending they were there.
And of course, I could now give Thursday at Rochdale a
miss. Except Thursday gave me a miss, and the game was again called off. The next match
was therefore Wrexham at home, where over 20,000 gathered to see trophies presented and
paraded, culminating in the inevitable pitch invasion when we finally provided the
material for some new photographs, to take the place of those from the Orient Game. We
eventually got to play Rochdale on the Monday, where we regaled the assembled with chants
of ‘Fourth Division Rubbish’ which we had so often used against our own team,
Ian Measham scored and Robbie Painter tucked away the last ever goal in the Fourth
Division.
We were the last champions of the Fourth Division. The
next season, with the premier league having buggered off and left the rest of us, we found
ourselves playing in the Second Division, and there, except for one season, we have
stayed. We were only the second side ever to underline our remarkable history by winning
the championships of all four divisions. We did it just in time.
In three recent seasons we have looked in danger of
slipping back to where we came. It was always vital not to, not simply because our club
might not recover, but also because to do so would have removed the meaning of that night
at York. The 1994 Wembley play-off was similarly invalidated by our subsequent relegation, and I couldn’t stand to see another memory tarnished. This
meant more than just a famous night out. It marked a major step in the renaissance of a
great club after seven years in the wilderness. The York Game, as it inevitably became
known, was a night when we marked the rediscovery of our pride in being Claret. I’ll
never forget it.
