The Longside Reference

“125 Years and Still In Business”

     “So we must be doing something right,” said Dave Edmundson the former CE in his programme notes a while ago. It’s an interesting opinion. On the surface quite true, but delve deeper worth a bit of scrutiny.
 
    Football’s a funny thing, sometimes ruled by the head and sometimes by the heart, a business but not a business, there’s a product that isn’t really a product, and if Burnley is still in business it’s been a chapter of accidents or deliberate intent, luck or bad luck, management or mismanagement, competence or incompetence, depending on whatever year, season, or period you wish to look at along the way.

     In the case of Burnley I’d suggest that yes here we are, the club is still in business, but history shows that it’s a club that has lurched along from event to event, success to crisis, crisis to success, good times and bad, since I first became interested in the late fifties.

    It’s easy to see what the club was doing right in the Potts/Lord glory years, and then the mid sixties. Then there were those glorious two seasons when Adamson was triumphant. But then from ‘76 until Bob Lord’s death it slowly deteriorated to the point of near insolvency.

     Time will reveal that the club got more right, financially, than people think in the first two years of Chairman John Jackson’s reign, but then of course screwed it all up in the Bond season, and by the end of it had barely a pot to you-know-what in.

     Mullen and Teasdale got things right, and then got things wrong, Ternent and Kilby got things right and then things went wrong, and in the traumatic Orient season it’s hard to see anything that was right other than that win on the final day.

     So, a pattern emerges, things are cyclical, though it’s hard to interpret what point of the cycle we are at now. We are in the Championship but struggling. The Chairman and board have financial plans to keep the club solvent and do things right, whilst on the field one could suggest that though the playing management might have their plans and determination to do things right, in reality things are going badly wrong. At the end of the day, all the plans in the world, and they might all be absolutely sound, are at the mercy of eleven blokes on a field trying to get a round thing into a net at one end and keep it out of a net at the other, with a bloke dressed in black getting in the way. 

     Generally speaking if you get good players and good tactics they will do OK and things will go right on the field. If they are not doing OK, especially over a long period, then without looking at individuals or apportioning blame or criticism, it isn’t rocket science to suggest that there are some basic truisms… the players aren’t good enough, or the tactics aren’t good enough, or both.

     So there we have the conundrum. Within a club it’s quite possible that there can be one set of people behind the scenes getting things right, and another group on the field getting things quite wrong. Who says football is straightforward? And that’s even before we look to analyse the part that luck plays, the bounce of a ball this way or that, a penalty, injuries, fluke goals (and God knows we’ve had enough comedy goals scored against us this season), and all the rest.

     Unfortunately it’s the blokes that we watch on a Saturday afternoon that are the ones who are currently visibly getting things wrong. And luck, a word we’ve heard quite often during our long barren run; they say it evens itself out over a season. But it’s probably no coincidence that bad teams have bad luck whilst others say that good teams make their own good luck. “Lucky Arsenal,” was an oft heard phrase years ago… funny how they had such good players. “Lucky Man U,” we’d moan as they scored yet another last minute winner. It’s no coincidence how they always have this incredible will to win.

    The ITV digital collapse that had a big impact at Burnley… was that bad luck… or the inability of highly intelligent, capable, professional people (who were supposed to know about these things), to read the small print, or spot that this contract was far from watertight. Was that the fault of people outside the club or inside the club? It can be argued that all Burnley’s current financial difficulties stemmed from that collapse. Decisions were made, players brought in, salaries were awarded, policies were formulated on the strength of money that was thought to be coming in, rather than known to be coming in, so that today the club does not even own the ground, needs directors to provide loans, and at one point only a couple of seasons ago had to beg supporters to donate enough money to keep it afloat.

     So, it’s a tough one, this idea that: “we must be doing something right.” Superficially true, but think about it carefully and you’ll uncover all kinds of near disasters, mismanagement, mistakes (how wonderful is hindsight), ups and downs, and certainly on at least three occasions in the last three decades near insolvency and the financial collapse of the club. And, in May 1987, Burnley Football Club could have ceased to exist. 

     At the level of the club, still existing after all these years, of new money being put into the club in January, of Barry Kilby somehow continuing to keep things on some sort of even keel, the forthcoming development of the Jimmy Mac corporate area, then yes, you can see what it means. But, facing a relegation scrap as the season enters the home straight, it’s hard to see what there is that is right at the moment on the field.

     But maybe nobody has any real control over any of these things at the end of the day. It occurred to me that maybe the ups and downs of Burnley Football Club are all part of the ‘chaos theory’. Apparently this theory wasn’t actually discovered until the 1960s by a bloke called Edward Lorenz. And if I understand it right it’s the science of trying to find order in disorder, of studying the lack of order where you would expect to find order, of trying to find explanations and patterns, and make predictions from random events. But according to this theory nothing is truly ordered or predictable. It is synonymous with the theory of Dynamic Instability. And, if you really think about it, can any of us see any sense of order or predictability in the events at BFC over the last 50 years?

     In today’s science ‘chaos’ is the study of chaotic systems and how they work and that somehow even the beating of a butterfly’s wings in Brazil can affect things that happen in  faraway Burnley.
‘The flapping of a single butterfly’s wing today produces a tiny change in the state of the atmosphere. Over a period of time what the atmosphere actually does is diverge from what it would have done. (Ian Stewart: The Mathematics of Chaos)

     So there you have it. The flapping of a butterfly a few thousand miles away made the weather bad enough in Burnley to call off the Stoke game. It’s a fascinating thought. The best laid plans of anyone will therefore come to naught when faced with the chaos theory.

    “We must be getting something right.” True enough… or is what is ‘right’ the result of random events, the result of accident and chaos and the butterfly effect. And maybe Thomas Hardy got it right as well when he placed his stories in a world where no one has any real control over the universal forces that determine our lives.

     So, bottom three dogfight, or a couple of wins and survival? The chaos theory says there can be no accurate prediction. Shucks, I think we knew that already.  
     “We must be getting something right, we’re still here.”
     “Despite all the mistakes we’ve made, we’re still here.”
     “In spite of all the butterflies in Brazil, we’re still here.”
      Take your pick folks.

Dave Thomas March 2007