The Longside Reference

MATCH REPORT

Burnley v Wolves

     Friday September 30th, it’s morning and it’s rain pouring down, power supplies off, no electricity, cafes, and bars open but producing limited choice of drinks and snacks. One or two have a small emergency generator but in short it’s a miserable day and not a single bar or café has any kind of TV screen functioning. Bedraggled tourists mostly of SAGA age wander round the puddle filled streets, the boats look miserable in the harbour, and the excursions are cancelled for the day.
    
     The previous night has seen terrific thunderstorms. The lightning has lit up the skies over and over again and we’ve sat by candlelight. Today the power is still off and tonight it’s Wolves v Burnley on Sky and I’ve found the one bar in Nidri that has a giant TV on one side of the room with SKY showing permanently and on the other side of the room another giant TV with a local Greek sports channel. Paradise you might say but that’s when they’re working. However, this is Greece and in spite of being current European Football Champions, Eurovision Song Contest winners, and dab hands at staging an Olympics, the old problems remain – when there’s a big storm – the bloody lights go out all over Greece and the TV’s go off.

     “Ah well doesn’t matter,” I think, “we never win there anyway but isn’t it just sod’s law. It’s Wolves v Burnley on TV, I’ve found a bar with SKY and the barman has promised it’ll be on. And that was yesterday, and today there’s no power.”

     But you know that in Greece when all is in despair, when you least expect it, at the last minute all will be well. This DIY nation, this Heath Robinson country where the average farmer uses two old tractors that don’t work to make one that will, where country folk drive round in three wheel cars that are probably thirty years old, and donkeys still wander up and down carrying great loads of sticks and twigs for the fire, sacks of charcoal to sell in town and thick leafy foliage to feed the family goats… somewhere in a mountain top field the engineers in their oil-skins and four-wheel drive will have found the pylon that has come crashing down. And they did and just in time the lights came back on and TVs all over the place flickered back into life.

     It isn’t supposed to rain in Greece quite as much as it did at the time of the Wolves Burnley game. It’s supposed to be blue skies and 80 degrees. It isn’t supposed to rain for three days running but with the TVs back on all that is forgotten. It looked pretty wet in Wolverhampton as well unless that was just rain running down the outside of the TV screen. Prior to the game we went down to the restaurant at the far end of the street – the Dionysus – they do a pretty good steak and chips. As rain bounced of the canvas canopy we scoffed away and then I left early to get down to the bar and make sure that SKY was still working and it was on the right channel.

     “Well this is a larf innit sitting here all this way away from home sitting watching Burnley on TV. Who’d have thought we’d be doing this. Nobody else seemed interested I have to confess; on the other TV on the other side of the room it was a South American game. Then the other members of our little group turned up, they’d eaten their steak a bit more slowly than me. A couple of strangers sat down nearby and glanced at the screen and then at me. “It’s Burnley,” I said full of life and enthusiasm. “My team,” I added proudly wearing my old yellow Burnley shirt. They were English but totally uninterested. “Oh.”

          But what a terrific evening it turned out to be as the rain still came down in torrents almost drowning out the TV sound. The old we-never-win-at-Wolves ghost well and truly laid to rest. Thoroughly deserved I thought as well; this was a fabulous, backs to the wall, gritty display, sure we had a load of luck but then it’s about time we had some I thought.
     The wine must have made me a bit blurred and hazy. I watched our team run around like terriers, covering, tackling, marking and tracking heroically, and thought bloody hell why can’t we play like this. Then I remembered this was us. I watched the free kick routine spellbound. For some reason you just knew it was going to go in. It’s years since we had recognisable, intelligent, rehearsed moves. I can remember the marvellous routine that won us the Charity Shield in the seventies against Man City. The same routine was used a few times and rarely seemed to fail. Plan A we used to call it. And here was another tried and tested by the Cotterill boffins in the Gawthorpe laboratories. G  O Connor grows in stature every game. He has deadly feet and strikes a dead ball superbly.

      When the free kick went in Mrs T and me leapt up and hollered. For the remainder of the game we oohed and aaarghed and squirmed and moaned and groaned and twisted and turned and sat on the edge of our seats, and drank more than we should. And at the end we clapped and beamed and I stood up and I pointed to the badge on my old yellow Burnley shirt and showed Nikos the barman and the stodgy English couple who had sat near us. Even they had to smile but not enough to make me offer to buy them a drink.

      Doesn’t it feel good when you win a home game? Doesn’t it feel twice as good when you’re there to see them win an away game? And doesn’t it feel three times as good and not just a little bizarre to sit in a Greek bar with a big TV that has SKY, all those miles away from home, and the rain still coming down in buckets, and see them win so well in a game that seemed to have all the atmosphere of a cup-tie as Wolves peppered us and we hung on, and hung on a bit more, and stole the points quite brilliantly.

     We stepped out into the rain to find the car for the drive back up to the apartment. And for once, getting drenched just didn’t seem to matter, even though in Greece it isn’t supposed to rain quite as long as this.

Dave Thomas.