A game of trench warfare

Palazzo

BURNLEY 0 IPSWICH TOWN 0

We all have a few laughs at the expense of Blackburn Rovers and Leeds United on a regular basis. Now it was Man United. Will Van Gaal last the season at Man U? Who knows, this is a poor Man U side at the moment. But something about Man United that Denis Law said made me laugh as well.

‘Would the side that you played in beat the current side?’ Law was asked.

‘Yes,’ he replied, ‘1-0’.

‘Only 1-0,’ the interviewer asked, ‘you surprise me.’

‘Well we’re all in our seventies now,’ said Law.

Van Gaal then announced that it had been a good year at Man U if you ignored December. It was a bit like saying the 80s were a good time at Burnley if young ignored years ’84 to ’90.

In past diaries I’ve brought you reports from various eateries: The Queen at Cliviger, The Kettledrum, Nino’s (haven’t been there for a while now), The Stubbing Wharf at Hebden Bridge, The Shepherd’s Rest at Lumbutts up above Todmorden and The Waggon and Horses at Cornholme.

In Burnley, Palazzo seems to be the new ‘in’ place and the restaurant to be seen in. But we tried somewhere new on the way home from the Ipswich game – The Hare and Hounds at Todmorden. It’s just out of Tod centre on the Burnley road and when last we heard as we watched the QPR game, largely bored, the water was rising in the car park, the Fire Service was on the way, and diners were making their way to their cars and getting soggy socks and wet feet. Nevertheless, we’d heard good reports about it so in we were booked in after the Ipswich game.

The site dates back to the seventeenth century and developed into a farmhouse when Tod was just a marshy valley and folks scraped a rural living. The stone fireplace is original. ‘Todmorden’ allegedly means marshy valley of the fox. £150,000 was spent on refurbishment and the place was opened by the Mayoress, Steph Booth and the two Thwaites dray horses Wainwright and Bomber. Old Bob Lord in his much younger days once had a horse called Kitchener that pulled his meat cart around the streets of Burnley.

We can’t imagine now how important horses used to be in everyday life years ago. The wagonette that the triumphant Burnley Cup team of 1914 paraded in from Rosegrove Station was pulled by magnificent horses. The town was filled with stone drinking troughs, stables, cart sheds, hay lofts and steaming middens. The noise of horses and wheels on cobblestones filled the streets. There were fish carts, butcher’s carts, fruit and veg carts, cabs, wagons, vans, box carts. Many were railway company vehicles or belonged to the Coop and the breweries. Huge Clydesdale horses pulled the heaviest of them.

Even in the late 40s and early 50s when I was a nipper in Todmorden I can remember the CO-OP coal wagons and the stables round the back of the CO-OP buildings on Dale Street. My father kept his car in one of them for years. Above the car was the hay loft and on the wall the great huge iron hay racks. All of these buildings including the long row of CO-OP shops are now gone; the furniture store, the men’s clothiers, the butchers, the general provisions store and all the rest, and in their places is housing.

Home to Ipswich Town: one manager said it was a tight game. The other one, McCarthy, said it was a great game. His summary was spot on; a tough game between two tough teams, competitive, neither side giving an inch, few chances and even fewer shots on target. He didn’t mean it was a great game in the sense that it was filled with dazzling football; but in the sense that this was all blood and thunder, up and under, in yer face, no quarter given and none asked.

It was a strange game in fact, short on football, but never dull, short on class but never boring. This was trench warfare and all the more absorbing for that. Ipswich came with one aim and that was not to lose. They very nearly did, however. Gray in the first half missed a glorious opportunity to put Burnley 1-0 up but from roughly the penalty spot side footed Kightly’s splendid low cross wide of the post.

Then, also in the first half, Burnley had what seemed a perfectly good goal disallowed when Ben Mee headed home from the corner. Why this was disallowed will remain a mystery. If it was impeding of the Ipswich goalkeeper there was not a Burnley player near him as Mee headed the ball from the horizontal position just a couple of feet above the ground. Stephen Ward and Andre Gray are the only other Burnley players anywhere near and both are being held by Ipswich defenders. If anything the keeper was impeded by his own players.

The referee afterwards said there were two fouls. Mee could only imagine it was his follow-up to the header when the goalkeeper went to ground. But, if there was any contact between Mee and any defender as he scored, it was absolutely nothing in comparison to what Ipswich defenders had got away with the whole game.

If there was any touch by any Burnley player on any other Ipswich player the decision made a mockery of the continual obstruction of Burnley players throughout the game, particularly Andre Gray, by Ipswich defenders. We lost count of the number of times that Gray was manhandled, mauled and molested so that he ended up on the floor. We lost count of the number of times he was gripped, groped or grabbed so that he was clearly impeded. And on every occasion the referee simply ignored these obstructions. Twice he was set to break clear until an arm wrapped round him pulled him down.

In the second half there was another great opportunity to go ahead. Gray did all the hard work and tricked his way along the by-line to within a few feet of the post. Burnley players were lurking on the edge of the 6-yard box waiting for the pull-back. It never came, Gray wildly choosing to blast the ball straight against the ‘keeper with an impossible shot, in his own attempt at glory. All he had to do was lift his head and see the players in better positions. Maybe he did but chose to ignore them.

‘If ever Mick McCarthy is appointed Burnley manager I’ll throw my season ticket on the pitch. A display of anti-football if ever there was one,’ was one comment. Those of us who ever saw him play can be forgiven for thinking it was as if he was back on the field himself. Hard as nails, sophisticated he was not. Thou shalt not pass was his creed and he has instilled it into all of his players. Astonishingly not one Ipswich player was booked even though these obstructions were so regular you could have set your clock by them. Yet two Burnley names went into the book.

If in doubt hoof it out seemed to be the Ipswich ploy. Head tennis was continuous. Passing moves were at a premium. The ball was lumped, humped and pumped incessantly. It was frequently excruciating to watch (scruffy said Dyche) yet it was still compelling such was the level of commitment and effort.

‘I loved the game,’ added McCarthy. ‘It was an honest match, no whinging from either side. There were some robust challenges but the players just got on with it. It was like a blast from the past.’

In that respect he was spot on. We watched a referee allow Ipswich players to hinder and obstruct, to wrap their arms around people, and to be blatantly physical so it was like watching games from past decades when players were barged and wrestled without protection.

There was a classic example of what went on all game when it was either Vokes or Gray who received a blatant two handed shove in the back by the touchline that was ignored.   In this sanitised game that we watch these days it’s a surprise to see it allowed especially when the Burnley goal was disallowed for an invisible foul. Like many others I watched on the Youtube replays over and again and for the life of me could see no infringement. It would have been a travesty had Ipswich won; a crime against football. Thank goodness they didn’t. It would have been a miserable journey home.

It was referee Bankes who received the biggest cheer of the day when at last he gave a free kick against one of the Ipswich defenders deep into the game. It was a roar big enough that our chums the Sutcliffes might have heard way up the road at Towneley. It was an ovation that was a big as anything that greets a goal such was the abysmality of his consistently dire performance.

The point about the 89th minute substitutions escaped most if not all of us. The gist of several comments was that the use of substitutes is very much Sean D’s Achilles heel. Gray by fair means or foul was well held but to be fair to him he must have felt he was playing against an octopus. Vokes for a big man has minimal physical impact. We couldn’t help thinking, oh for a fit blood-and-guts Barnes to dish some of the physical treatment back to unscrupulous centre-backs, to make them think twice about getting too close. Hennings could have been brought on far earlier to make use of his quickness, pace and control. The one shot he had in the final seconds dipped too late. Taylor came on in the 89th minute as well, presumably in the vain hope that a free-kick opportunity might miraculously present itself on the edge of the box. With this referee that possibility was largely zilch, about as likely as George Osborne investigating the banks, or Iain Duncan-Smith being kind and helping the poor.

Dyche was pleased that this was the ninth clean sheet of the season, three of them in the last four games. I was pleased with the hearty and restorative pub grub at the Hare and Hounds. Three of us had the steak and ale pie with a thick pastry top that was manna from heaven with the extra gravy. Mash was my preference to chips, mash to absorb the meat juices and scoop up with the succulent steak. Others had the haddock and chips, the haddock the size of a small whale. And, under a tenner, which for me is outstanding for food of this quality.

Mrs T says my football stuff takes up too much room in the house. And then another parcel arrives and this newest one is a magnificent book, large A4 format, The Heyday of the Football Annual. Published by Constable it’s a beautifully put together tribute to the football annuals that many of us received as presents when we were kids years ago, and folk like me still collect today. The best remembered are the Charles Buchan Football Monthly and the Topical Times annuals. Border Bookshop in Todmorden on Halifax Road has an upstairs room with dozens of them.

It was Christmas Day in 1959 when legions of schoolboys up and down the country un-wrapped the first issue of the Topical Times annual. On the cover Bobby Charlton is smacking a leather ball out of a pillar-box red background. There had been other annuals before this but this particular book heralded the golden age of the football annual. Then, as the sixties progressed, shelves in bookshops, Woolworth’s and local newsagents began to bulge with titles reflecting the expanding and exciting world of football.

All of these annuals were educational and insightful taking us into changing rooms, onto the pitch, behind the scenes, lounges, boardrooms and into players’ and managers’ heads. Grainy photographs in the first annuals let us see the effort on faces, the power of tackles and the melees and scrums of the penalty areas. Hand coloured full page illustrations brought vividness and brightness to a game that we largely viewed in black and white back then. We might have been Burnley supporters but we learned about every club up and down the land.

We could learn about not just the big clubs, Arsenal, Manchester United or Tottenham, but the little clubs, Forfar Athletic or Doncaster Rovers. If one of these annuals contained a Burnley feature it was all the more treasured. As schoolboys we queued at the players’ entrance to get autographs from the likes of Ray Pointer and Jimmy Robson, Andy Lochhead or Brian O’ Neil. Into the 70s and it was Paul Fletcher, Colin Waldron or Frank Casper.

They took us to places like Dundee and Carlisle, Scunthorpe and Portsmouth. We read about which players grew Chrysanthemums as a hobby, kept budgerigars, went fishing or had tropical fish tanks, what TV programmes they watched, drank tea down at the local café, (speaking of which one of the pictures is of Dave Thomas, Steve Kindon and John Murray sitting at a table in a local café.) Pages were graced with pictures of Tommy Lawton, Billy Wright, Johnny Haynes, Albert Quixall, Albert Johanneson, Derek Dougan, Laurie Cunningham and so many others.

I have a basement with shelves filled with them – nostalgia at its very best.

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