The Longside Reference

HISTORY WITH MR. T

BARGAINS AT THE BURNLEY SALES

     You won’t have forgotten the home game against Reading in 2004/2005 will you? It was sitting through some of the dire end of season stuff this year that made me think of it. It would have been more fun watching your toenails grow. The most mind numbing, drab, featureless, wretched game since Charles Sutcliffe first began dabbling with fixture lists. That was the game where a sneaky 1 – 0 win would have put us just three points away from the top six with two games in hand. As it happens we drew it 0 – 0.  Burnley, the nearly club, always nearly in the top six at Christmas and then it falls apart. The top six, scary… and a scenario possibly not in any three-year-plan in the CE’s bottom drawer methinks. Anyway it was while I dreamed of a hot coffee, and then a brandy, and then anything as my face and lips turned blue, that I began to ponder on the transfer of Robbie Blake, and the possible transfer of Richard Chaplow. This season the pondering was to do with the sale of Akinbyi. There were two camps, the one that said wow what a deal, the other said but hey he’s our best player, without him who scores? If there is one thing guaranteed to provoke discussion and breast beating it is the transfer of any of our top players. “How can we do it? Why must we sell? How will this help ticket sales? What’s happened to all the extra income this season?

     At half time in that game two seasons ago I sat and thought that surely the second half of the game must improve. It didn’t, though rumours spread that we had a shot, or two actually, from Valois, one of which was only narrowly wide. Valois was one of our few ‘personalities’, he had a trick or two up his sleeve, he was nimble, neat, in the mood could scamper about a bit, to look at, the poor man’s Kevin Keegan until he got his hair cut. But sadly he flattered to deceive.

     Anyway, to while away the time and to keep my brain from totally freezing over I pondered with renewed vigour and thought of all those players who were transferred in one particular year, and here’s where the history bit comes in, the year 1968 sprang to mind. Perhaps the word ‘sprang’ is not quite accurate, ‘lurched’ might be better, the state my head was in.

     1968 was a vintage year for the Turf Moor cash registers and Bob Lord must have slept and dined well that year as the cash flow was inwards rather than outwards. As I write, we have just sold one player, in 1968 we sold 4, and that was just the big names, there may have been other smaller bit part players but I’m not too sure about that. Out went Gordon Harris, Willie Irvine, Willie Morgan and then Andy Lochhead. These were fabulous names and still are to us oldies and any youngster who can’t name and spell them correctly should be made to stand in his bedroom corner until he can recite them accurately. You can forget Blake and Chaplow all you young ‘uns, and before that dear old Glen bendyman Little. These blokes were twice the players they will ever be. In effect what was sold in those 12 months was nearly half of the team that only two seasons previously had been compared with the championship side of 59/60 and deemed by many to have been even better. It had been third in 65/66, and this was also the season that Willie Irvine became one of the immortals when he scored his 29 league goals. The following season it was into Europe they went. But bit-by-bit it went off the boil the general consensus being that a leaky defence was its downfall and a regular inconsistency, which meant they dazzled in one game and then dozed in the next. And then of course when Irvine broke his leg in February 67, the goals dried up that season. So thus, the following year this great side was well and truly broken up as one by one the big names went as part of the Bob Lord sales machine. In they came as teenagers at one end of the conveyor belt at Gawthorpe and were then spewed out at the other as their usefulness allegedly decreased and their sell by date approached. Blunt Bob always used to maintain that every player who left Turf Moor had left his best years behind; he had to find something to justify the find ‘em, train ‘em, sell ‘em policy at every AGM.

     But not every player fitted into his claim and certainly of the 4 in ’68 we can find Gordon Harris continuing to play another 120 games for Sunderland. ‘Bomber’ was as explosive as his nickname and there was certainly one well-documented physical set-to with Jimmy Adamson during training, and rumours of several others with other players. Perhaps Gordon is best known not just for his cannon ball left foot shots but for inspiring Bob Lord to fine him explaining that he would not tolerate thuggishness on the field (he would rather be relegated he said) after Gordon had decked someone at Sheffield. He is possibly also the first Burnley player to be pictured in the buff in the Burnley Express, but this was no calendar job; this was to show the readers the bruises he had amassed all over his body in a particularly nasty game at Newcastle. Burnley Express readers of the nervous old lady type might well have fainted into their tea cups at the sight.

     And then it was Willie Irvine next on the way out in March 68. It would be fair to say that this mercurial Irishman who once had a hairstyle so Elvis like that he had to duck to walk under low bridges, was ready for a change. He’d had an in and out kind of season and he and Jimmy Adamson could not be described as best pals, though Jimmy Adamson only recently spoke to me glowingly of his scoring and poaching skills and would have had him first choice in any Burnley team. Willie likewise speaks glowingly of Adamson’s coaching skills… but sadly in life some people are just destined never to get on together and so it was with Jimmy and Willie. Willie thus departed for Preston North End with every rumour reported to Willie by a reporter called Len Noads, that just about every Division One team would have signed him but guess who, yup, Bob Lord, vetoed any big move, doing just the same later with a proposed move by Andy Lochhead from BFC to Man City. Three weeks before Willie moved, a bid by Blackburn Rovers (aaaargh) was turned down. But that we don’t mind I suspect. Legend Willie in a blue and white Blackburn shirt, no that’s something I can’t quite get my head round. Was Willie sold when he was past his peak? I think not, he went to Preston and saved them from relegation. He went to Brighton and won a promotion medal. And along the way picked up six more international caps including England 0 - N Ireland 1. It was a bad career move to Halifax and injuries that ended his love affair with professional football when he chose Halifax in preference to West Ham so as to move back North.

     And then there was Willie Morgan sold in July 68 to Man United instead of Leeds because Bob Lord couldn’t abide Leeds. He couldn’t abide Man U either but the lure of the dosh eased his distaste for that lot. Sold past his peak? Surely not, he went on to win a Division Two medal and 20 more caps for Scotland. Willie Irvine tells the story that when Morgan first appeared on the touchline ready to come on to make his first appearance in a trial match, the rest of them just stood in disbelief and stared at this odd-looking stranger. His hair was greased and slicked back like an early John Travolta, his baggy white shorts were hitched up so high they looked like a nappy, and his matchstick legs were the colour of a white billiard ball. Then he came on and nobody could get the ball of him for the next 20 minutes. The rest is history.

     In October ’68 Andy Lochhead was next. By now supporters were wondering just how many would be sold that year but to ease the pain the youth team had won the FA Youth Cup earlier in the year and the club felt safe in the knowledge that the next batch of talent was knocking on the door. Bob Lord (fed up hearing his name I bet by now aren’t you) scuppered a move to Man City and off he went to Leicester instead, presumably thought to be less of a threat to Burnley than Man City. Past his peak – well at Leicester he reached a Wembley Cup Final and then moving on he played another 150 games at Aston Villa, winning a Division Three medal and then even after that went on to win a Division Three medal at Oldham.

     Harris, Irvine, Morgan and Lochhead all gone in the space of less than a year and when you think that Alex Elder a world class full back was sold only a few months before this fab four, then you realise just what a wealth of talent appeared week in week out at Turf Moor.

     So cheer up you folk who are distraught at the loss of Blake and Chaplow, Little and Akinbyi, think of your elders, who have had years of this. For sure we had the pleasure and privilege of seeing these legends play, but just think how many times we had the pain of seeing them go.      

DaveThomas 2006