The Longside Reference

     The upper tier at the away end must have been almost filled with 1000+ supporters. It had occurred to me coming down on the coach on Friday (in a deep philosophical moment) what an amazing phenomenon Burnley away support is. There were fans there from well beyond Burnley itself, from the far north, from Scotland, Wales, Northern Ireland, Yorkshire, Devon Cornwall and Norfolk. Burnley exiles so many of them, who see the team perhaps half a dozen times a year or less, coming by train, plane, bus and car. For a game in London many of those who turn out are ‘locals’ now working or living in and around the city. You wonder if the £3k a week Burnley footballer has any notion of this, what it means, how they identify with them, how desperate these fans are for a win, or failing that some sort of a performance, something good to remember, some reward for the effort and money they spend to get to QPR.

     I wonder?
     A weekend trip with the Burnley Supporters Club seemed a good idea. Secretary Joyce Haluk clearly has this off to a fine art and Chairman Barrie Oliver provides supper boxes with a selection of goodies for the journey. Contentedly munching a little pork pie I have another philosophical moment and think about the number of people who run supporters clubs and organisations like the Clarets Trust, and run websites and fanzines and spend hours of their lives with Burnley FC in the centre.

     It was a textbook journey. Arrive at 10pm after a 4.30 departure from outside the Turf, stop at Banbury for a swift jar; on to London, find hotel (tricky), and unpack. Check mini bar in hotel room, £16 just to open the door. The sign says remove a bottle from its place for longer than 30 seconds and you will be billed for it.  Straight round from the London Bridge Hotel to the nearest ancient pub down a narrow cobbled alleyway, for more liquid revivers, (Southwark one of the oldest parts of London), on the way stepping over the local doorway residents in their sleeping bags and through the litter. It’s the saddest feature of London life. I’m a sucker for anyone homeless who sleeps rough cuddling a dog under a blanket. I slipped one couple and their dog a twenty, my good deed for the day, I’d never have a penny if I lived here, and then thought bugger I could have given them a Willie Irvine book, now down to £9.99 and saved myself a tenner.

     Nice hotel, and Saturday starts with the classic hotel Full English breakfast; healthy eating be damned. There were plates piled up so high it was a miracle of physics that half of it didn’t fall off as you walked back to the table balancing it all precariously. The head concierge, Paul O Pray, looked at the Burnley scarves. Believe it or not, he used to work in the Keirby Hotel in Burnley in the seventies. Passing through Burnley one day from Newcastle, he stopped, looked, fancied a change of job, and became a chef there for five years. “All the top teams used to stay there on a Friday,” he said. “We used to get tickets off the managers and so I became a Burnley fan.” At this point he recited from memory the entire Adamson team that was supposed to be the team of the seventies.

     The football match becomes incidental on a weekend like this, sure it’s why you’re there but in truth there are better things to do than worry about it. With the hotel location being where it is, the obvious thing seemed to be to head over the bridge, saunter along the embankment and end up at The Tower for a couple of hours. And this dear reader is where you get the compulsory history bit. Don’t skip it; there may be a test at the end of the book.

     If you’re clever you will remember that in It’s Burnley Not Barcelona I told you about how I went to the doctor’s one day for a cure for my foot infection. But somehow I drifted on to the subject of Piles, one of the side effects being that sometimes the pain can feel like having a red hot poker stuck up the a***. So this led to me telling you that one English king, Edward the 2nd,  was murdered when he did indeed have a red hot poker stuck up his derriere. This murder was allegedly ordered by his wife Isabella, which seems a bit over the top simply because he cut up her credit cards.
     Anyway all this leads me to say that here is the history bit for Russians Don’t Land Here.

     Big Ken is indeed big, 6’ 8” I’d imagine, ex Regimental Sergeant Major, huge man, face like a Father Christmas, and a star turn, sadly due to be pensioned off this summer.

  
     “The Hilton of medieval prisons,” Big Ken began with, where only the nobility were brought and could buy decent food and furnishings while they were in there. No riff raff here, only those who had committed quality crime like plotting against the king. Walter Raleigh was kept prisoner for 13 years and even had his wife in with him though history does not record if he actually wanted her there or not. Big Ken concentrated on the gory stuff as we ambled round behind him. Every now and then there was a stop for a few more gruesome details about the pleasures of medieval life. The Duke of Monmouth suffered five attempts to behead him as the axe man kept missing or struck narrowly wide (a bit like our forwards at the moment). After the fifth attempt his head was removed with a sharp knife. (One in five is not a good scoring rate). Then his head was stitched back onto his body so that a portrait could be painted of the dead body. “He looks a bit pale,” was the rather general consensus of the finished work. 

  
     Then we’d move on. Ken would say: “make me a gangway please” and the crowd would part. Another prisoner by the name of Robert Overbury was disposed of by the tried and trusted poison method, or at least the attempted poison method. 24 attempts were made before they gave in. They should have tried the Turf Moor mushy peas. They work first time. In the end they suffocated him.

    The man in charge of all this fun and games was the Constable of the Tower and after a hard day poisoning, beheading, hanging, garrotting, impaling, torturing, skewering, limb-removing, and receiving bribes, he would retire to spend a pleasant evening hour in his private garden to unwind and clear his head. My God they must have got through a fair few murders over the years. In Victorian times when one of the chapels was excavated over 1500 remains were found. Not to worry though. They were all Chelsea fans. 

     Crowds of over 14,000 would turn up on Tower Hill to watch a public execution. There’d be tumblers, acrobats, magicians, jugglers a warm-up comedian and all manner of entertainment.  There’d be refreshments, ale tents and pie stalls. It was in truth a good day out and what I suppose the Constable, had he been Dave Edmundson, would refer to as the matchday experience. The unlucky victim would be expected to make a pre-beheading speech. For a small fee those who wanted to be spared this public event, could have it done in private somewhere near the Constable’s little garden. You’ll be thinking of course that 14,000 is a top crowd and more than we get at The Turf these days. If DE really wants to enhance the matchday experience at the Turf then here’s the answer, introduce this sort of event before the match and then have a quickie or two at half time. You could start with the people who decided to downgrade the A&E department at Burnley hospital, and then work your way through most politicians, (all the ones I’ve ever met and had to work with would sell their own grandmothers), and after that move on to traffic wardens, and then the people who collect the money from speed cameras.

     In short, the Tower of London is a good day out, and if Willie Irvine’s Together Again brought a lump to your throat then read the story of the two little princes in the Tower. Their little skeletons were found behind a wall one day, years after they had been murdered. I’m blubbing just thinking about it. What dark and foul deeds they were that took place in this ancient place… but no worse I suppose than the average football boardroom. 

The Game: And so we all turned up at QPR on a beautiful blue sky day. We homed in from all areas of the land. We are simple folk and expect anyone in a claret shirt to be more than just a mercenary. Trouble is, that’s exactly what they are. But the very least we want is pride, 100% effort and a never say die spirit. One thing we will not tolerate is a team that just rolls over and dies, and players that just go through the motions. And today, this team did roll over, second to every ball, barely winning a header, giving the ball away over and again, anxious simply to be rid of it. A lot of people returned to their homes more than just disappointed. QPR just lost four in a row, in the bottom three at start of play. They gave us a pasting and not one of us could have expected the manner of it, especially as something unusual happened in the first half. We scored.

     We saw a Burnley goal for the first time in weeks. Trouble is QPR scored three and to add insult to injury two of them came from perfect corners, the very thing we cannot do ourselves.

     And so we all turned up at QPR thinking, surely there’ll be at least a point against a side even worse than us. Many of us really thought there might be a win. No. We got the defeat we deserved and angry boos rang down from the Burnley end as the players left the field. QPR won’t have an easier game all season.

     And us: from top six to fighting to stay out of the bottom six. This is still not quite a relegation battle but think of it this way; Burnley are just two defeats away from the bottom three. Only the fact that each week some of the teams below us obligingly lose keeps our heads above water. This weekend, Leeds, Barnsley, Hull and Coventry all lost.

     How ironic that at the start of the season I chose Coventry as a comparison with Burnley and I wondered if the final game of the season between the two clubs would decide a top six place. What price now that the game isn’t a relegation decider?

                                      Steve’s Soundbite
“Everybody is hurting and at the moment it is tough, but I will support the players all the way, even when they do things that upset and disappoint you. We have shown we can do it and we know we can do it but at the moment we are down and we need a lucky break. We need something to go for us because at the moment they are the same players they were earlier in the season. We will get back there but one thing you can’t do is give them a confidence pill. We were undone by two corners… today we had a nightmare with corners… when a goal goes against us at the moment, we fade… we look devoid of confidence. ”