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No Nay Never Dinner
October 11th 2008-10-19
Well, as we say up north, this were a reet good do, even though after the Harry Potts dinner two years ago there was some doubt on my part that there would be interest in another similar function. I have to confess that when these things are mooted at £30 a ticket there is always the worry that attendance will be low.
But on the night, 250 people turned out to dine royally and be entertained by the unique Steve Kindon. If you know he is the star turn, then you know what you are going to get. His act is not for the faint hearted or the delicate of hearing.
Players there, after last minute cancellations and replacements, included Jimmy Mac, Ian Brennan, Jimmy Robson, Ian Britton, Super Johnny Francis, Roger Eli, Martin Dobson, Ray Pointer and Frank Casper. TV celebs were Richard Moore and Emmerdale’s Christopher Chittell (the evil Pollard), the latter presented with a club tie by his former colleague Richard Moore. This we hope to see on all future episodes of Emmerdale of course.
As ever the players came in one by one to applause and acclamation. Jimmy Mac is always the last to appear and still looks spry enough to come on from the subs bench for the last ten minutes of a game.
A bit of his guile would not have gone amiss in the frenetic Birmingham game a week later. There we were with a 1 – 0 lead and coasting, in complete control. If only we’d had someone with Jimmy’s craft and guile to take the ball into the corner areas and run the clock down as he used to do, guarding, screening, sticking out his backside and making it impossible to take the ball from him; that 1 – 0 lead might have been the final score. If it was good enoug h to win a championship 50 years ago somebody should tell our current forwards.
(No Nay Never, Volume 1)
The substitution of Paterson was puzzling. He’d had the Birmingham defence on edge all afternoon, made the goal with a sublime cross for McCann, and was a real handful. To replace him with the pacey Eagles might have been understandable, but with the mono-paced Blake, whose legs on the evidence of this game seem to have gone, was baffling to say the least. It handed all advantage to Birmingham until the final five minutes or so. Elliot was getting crosses over at will, but our one forward who can head a ball, Thompson, had also been taken off.
Anyway back to the subject: A friend of mine came up from Kent for the dinner. He’s a Chelsea supporter and dines there regularly before a game. Chelsea food isn’t a patch on this at Burnley he said, and they’re supposed to have the finest chefs. He left not a scrap of his Lamb Henry, (apparently named after Henry VIII because he liked nothing better than to chew on a chunk of marinated lamb shoulder before or, and, after a bit of rumpy pumpy). This plus the mountains of veg, the outstanding thick gravy, and Chris Gibson’s speciality ‘sauce a la mint’, the Sticky Toffee Puds for afters, and of course Columbian Mints. How could/would we ever end a dinner without them?
All in all the evening raised nearly £1,500 for youth development; that being the money that the Supporters’ Club donated in a show of their support for the book and the evening. It’s very satisfying to see that the youth team currently march on undefeated with nine wins out of nine in their results so far. The word is that there are some good kids down at Gawthorpe, not to mention Alex Macdonald, Adam Kay, Jay Rodrigues and regular first teamer Chris McCann a Gawthorpe product. His display against Birmingham was masterful.
So what’s next? There are muttered mumblings from some quarters that there are too many Burnley books at the moment. It’s almost a grumble. “We do more books than Manchester United,” said one BFC employee as if it was some kind of terrible problem. Five or six years ago a new Burnley book was a rare event, so that it caused some excitement. Now there can be three a year. What’s happened is quite simple. There are now four retired blokes, all mad keen Burnley fans. Now I can’t speak for them but I don’t play golf, and don’t go hiking, I don’t paint and decorate the house every year or creosote the garden fence. We write Burnley books because we enjoy it and because this club has so much history, drama and so many stories. If we sell just a few hundred copies on the way we’re happy enough.
Sometime in 2009 there will be an in-depth book about the ‘59/60 title win to coincide with the 50th anniversary. There is word that there will be a book on the subject of Burnley Trivia. Meanwhile I work on another biography the subject of which I shall stay quiet about for the moment. It may or may not come off.
And what about all the other bits of Burnley history that might be covered in depth, there’s:
A Bob Lord biography
The Jimmy Adamson managerial years
A blow by blow book of the awful Orient season
The John Jackson years that included promotion, relegation, Bond and relegation again.
The Jimmy Mullen years
The Kilby years
And of course a No Nay Never Volume Three
I’ll be 70 by the end of that lot I reckon. And by then, who knows, we might even have experienced a promotion to the Prem, and boy that’s definitely another book. Being realistic you know that no Burnley book is ever going to hit the mass market. A realistic target for a biog or any kind of hardback is 2,000 copies (Clarets Chronicles has just about exceeded this). The Potts and Irvine biogs however were both below this when last I heard. In fact the Irvine book is now ‘binned’ although ‘remaindered’ is the more respectable book trade word. A ‘diary’ of a season might reach 1,000, unless it was a hugely successful season with a promotion at the end of it. The most successful book was Stan’s of course.
Anyway, somehow I’ve digressed… oh yes… the dinner. It was a superb evening notwithstanding the lateness of the auction and the time it took to complete it. If it suffered from anything it was that there just isn’t the money about these days to raise vast amounts on every item. The matchball with which Jay Rodrigues knocked Fulham out of the Carling went for something over £400 and a signed Bob Kelly item went for £250. The latter was unique, a one-off item, consisting of a framed 1920 magazine cover portrait of the man and an autograph beneath it. This was indeed a piece of Burnley history. Whoever won that item was a lucky man to acquire it for such a price. In fact I can safely say it has gone to a very good Burnley-supporting home.
So many signed items now are products of an almost obscene commercial process which sees ‘name’ sports stars sitting down with a middle-man, signing dozens of pictures at a time, which are then sold on to High Street memorabilia shops or after-dinner auctions. EBay too is full of them. In total contrast, an item like the Bob Kelly picture and signature is quite unique. Does anyone at a BFC dinner really want a Denis Law or a Coronation Street signed picture? After really lengthy, laborious bidding neither went for three figures.
But, many thanks to all those who attended the dinner, the players and celebs who willingly signed menus and books, the people who bought tables of ten, the Supporters’ Club who sponsored the event and MC Geoff Brown who donated himself free for the evening. He finished his stint with sweat pouring off him after a more than 4-hour stint on the microphone. Like I said, for 250 people it were a reet good do.
Dave Thomas October 2008
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