Winners Win
A season review of Burnley FC and their recent promotion to the Premier League
Having been to school in the East Midlands, the away fixtures at Coventry on the Saturday afternoon and Derby, the following Tuesday evening, had a certain appeal to me. My partner and mum both live in the area, so it turned into a long weekend away including a curry at the truly excellent Gurkha Junction in Spondon and Sunday lunch at The Boot in Repton, a dishevelled Bass boozer in 1980, tolerant of underage drinkers, and now a rather polished, posh gastro pub.
Both Derby and Coventry occupy relatively new stadia dating from 1997 and 2005, respectively. Although infinitely superior for visitors in every respect than the Highfield Road and Baseball Grounds they superseded, the Coventry Building Society Arena and Pride Park just don’t evoke the same emotional resonance. Trunk road and rail access, ample parking, 360-degree visibility, all-weather perfect playing surfaces aside, I can’t imagine anyone lamenting their passing when the wheel of progress grinds again and they get wiped from the map.
So over two matches, the full spectrum of the Championship was on display: Burnley on top, Coventry somewhere in the upper middle, and Derby clinging on for dear life, just above the drop zone to, in Old Money, Third Division obscurity.
And the surprising conclusion across the two matches? There was bugger all difference between them in terms of quality. Unlike some previous Premier League encounters involving the Clarets and top-drawer opponents where there has been an evident gulf between the teams in terms of skill, speed, organisation and tactics, this just wasn’t in evidence at either fixture. And without that moment of Neolithic opportunism as Joshua capitalised on a Sunday League pub-side level of confusion and miscommunication in the Coventry lines, it would have been a paltry two points from a maximum of six. But winners win; that’s the way of the world and no more so true than in elite sport.
Having gone a goal down to Coventry in the first five minutes to what has to go down as a defensive lapse by Laurent, the reaction was calm, measured and professional. Just like the engineer who has systematically identified the problem with my wine cabinet and is fixing it while I’m typing this, Burnley diagnosed the issue and set about resolving matters by dominating possession and equalising after a patient, artfully worked move ten minutes later.
On re-watching this, what is particularly impressive is the players instinctively passed over two 50% chances to score in favour of the third, 95% certainty that any competent pro should convert, that Jaidon Anthony duly did.
“A general’s responsibility is to protect against defeat; the enemy will provide the opportunity for victory” is a much-plundered Sun Tzu maxim from ‘The Art of War’. A minute after half-time, it held true again as Coventry’s goalkeeper, outside the penalty area and poorly protected by two defenders, gave Anthony the tiny chink of light he needed to pounce and roll the ball into an unguarded net.
After that, the axis of Trafford, Estevé & Egan-Riley (reminiscent of the Heaton, Mee, Tarkowski fortress of the Dyche era) proved sufficient to defend the narrow advantage. Teams of lesser confidence may have sought the security blanket of a two-goal margin. But this was clearly not the plan, although it would certainly have made for a less fraught spectacle…
Two days later, Billy, the decorator doing some work for my mum’s neighbour, confidently predicted a 3-2 win for his beloved Rams. His thesis was that Derby had now turned the corner and would soar away from the relegation zone. Furthermore, an apparition had been seen at Shardlow, where Derby’s river Derwent meets Nottingham’s Trent, of Brian Clough rising from the swirling torrents, who would lead Derby back to the halcyon days of the 1970s. I made the last bit of that up, by the way, but Billy assured me that the evening would be a feast of goals and scintillating attacking play.
Stick to decorating, Billy. Neither team disgraced themselves, more just cancelled one another like out-of-phase sine waves, resulting in a sort of footballing white noise I can scarcely remember a single detail of. Both sides seemingly applying a similar calculus, albeit for differing reasons: at this critical juncture of the season, neither could afford defeat. And in Derby’s case, this did indeed prove critical as they dodged relegation by a single point.
Bismarck once quipped that there are two things you should avoid seeing being made: laws and sausages. Watching your team grub a point on an unseasonably cold night in an East Midlands retail and business park is an unappetising but necessary part of the process of getting promoted and might be added to that list.
So it was Mission Accomplished and further proof of the discipline and focus that this group has. Only the ever-exuberant Hannibal and pantomime villain Barnes spiced things up a bit towards the end. But I did feel a bit sorry for the impressive number of Burnley supporters who had braved the early evening M6 for this anaemic encounter.
No matter. Three matches later (of which I saw Watford live and Sheffield on TV from a deserted and largely disinterested Jonty Farmer pub in Derby), 100 points were on the board and promotion secure.
Of the two matches, it was Watford that highlighted the importance of cohesion and discipline in separating winners and losers when other quantifiable variables (talent, pay, fitness, etc.) are more or less equal. Burnley again recovered after an early setback with two exacting team goals, while a wild and emotional Watford side managed to get two players sent off. The second incident was particularly dim-witted: quite how flooring an opponent— right in front of the referee— as both teams waited to restart after your side has just gone behind can help your prospects is an intriguing question without any obvious answers.
In Season 2 of Mission to Burnley, one of the directors made the perceptive observation that Vincent Kompany didn’t seem to have a core group of players he could build a team around. Scott Parker seems to have recognised the importance of this. In the form of Trafford (the latest in a long line of excellent keepers), Estéve (a Beckenbauer level of imperiousness at the back), Brownhill (a case study in leadership by example and in the middle of everything) and Anthony (elegant lethality upfront and now a permanent hire), he has four such players. He just needs to hang onto them now…