Doing the 92 is Daniel Storey’s odyssey to every English football league club in a single season. The best way to follow his journey is by subscribing here
Turf Moor provides the best view from any football ground in the country and I will accept no arguments because I’ve done it often enough that it has become a tiny part of my personality. As you climb up the steps in the James Hargreaves Stand, you must stop yourself turning on the spot halfway and thus spoiling the vista before it has become perfect.
From the top is industrial England in excelsis: factory tower, cotton mills, church steeples and spires, a cricket ground, diagonal rows of slate roofs on sandstone terraced housing, like someone has managed to solve and reorganise an Escher painting and, eventually, rolling hills of green and pleasant land.
Burnley manages to keep its capitalist trappings below second-floor level and thus out of sight from above, meaning the view exists in panoramic permanence.
On this Tuesday evening, after a pink sunset has given way to grubby grey and then a nightscape broken by the warm glow of domestic lounges and the more fluorescent, stark light of street lamps, you wish you could have the view burned into your mind. Burnley are playing Plymouth Argyle and it is not good fare.
Burnley win 1-0, via a Josh Brownhill penalty, but the general mood is one of harrumphing frustration, as if to say “You got us out of the house on a weeknight for this?”.
Burnley manage two other shots on target and Plymouth fail to have a single one. Home supporters grumble about slow passing and then grumble when a long ball finds nobody. They file out happy at full-time, but not quite sated.
I wonder if what Burnley supporters are currently experiencing is a lack of emotional home. For years on end, there was a distinct identity here that enveloped you from the moment you took your seat.
Sean Dyche’s team tended to reflect the glorious vista itself, an assortment of simple principles and British players that combined to create something stark but somehow beautiful in its own distinct way.
Eventually, those principles became so ingrained that they held Burnley back and, when they tried to change, everything fell apart. After relegation came Vincent Kompany, who brought with him identity to the point of dogma. I was at Turf Moor around this time two years ago when Kompany got his first home win in charge, 2-0 against Millwall.
There were groans that night too, but more gasps as Kompany’s team learnt on the job to pass the ball out through a press. Arijanet Muric played largely outside his penalty area and four of Burnley’s 22 shots were created through one-touch flicks. Yes, this was indeed new.
That era may or may not have scarred Burnley; we’ll find out soon enough. But they saw last season going terribly and they kept the faith because Kompany was building something bigger and better and more sustainable than one campaign, or so the theory went. Then he got a better offer, left, and Burnley had a Vincent Kompany squad with no obvious sense of which direction to move in next.
The certainty of the Dyche era left with him. Since Kompany arrived in June 2022, Burnley have signed 40 players on permanent deals. From the core of familiar dependables, Burnley now have no entrant in a top 40 of longest-serving players at current Championship clubs and Jay Rodriguez is the only one to have been there longer than five seasons.
In terms of average time spent at the club by a first-team player, only Hull City have a lower figure than Burnley.
Exacerbation comes with Burnley’s reputation as new occupiers of the space between the Premier League and Championship: down, up, down and now an attempt at promotion again. There’s nothing like winning the league with 101 points and then getting relegated with 24 to make you feel like you don’t belong in either league. It creates its own state of flux.
That presents its own challenge at Burnley because of the owners’ recruitment model. Of the 40 players signed since Kompany’s appointment, 25 were aged 23 or under – buy young, develop quickly, sell high. That development is not helped by seasons in the Premier League when it becomes patently obvious that you are not good enough.
What might be helpful, if Burnley are indeed promoted this season, would be to receive their prize as a voucher to be redeemed at their own wishes having spent another season or two developing a squad that can cope in the top flight. It goes without saying: the finances make promotion the highest priority.
For those who call Turf Moor home and pay handsomely for the privilege, the Premier League hasn’t been much fun of late. Stretching back to January 2021, Burnley have won seven of their last 48 Premier League home games.
Last season, their record at Turf Moor against the 17 teams who stayed up read: played 17, won one, drew three, lost 13, scored 12, conceded 42. The only teams they beat were Sheffield United and Luton Town, who both came down with them.
That has to subconsciously shape your emotions, right? You can want what is best for the club (which is promotion, because: money), but nobody can watch their team get picked off on the regular and remain delighted about the prospect of a repeat when the interim is filled with home wins.
Those people who say “Oh but you get to watch the best players in the world” are not to be trusted.
“There’s probably less of a desperation given the experience we had last year,” says Andrew Greaves of From The Bee Hole End, a Burnley podcast.
“The feeling is probably that (again) we’re almost too good for the Championship but the current squad would struggle in the Premier League. The gulf between the two divisions is getting wider and it’s getting more difficult to compete.
“The Championship is fun. We’ve not lost many of the games we’ve played in this division over our last few seasons in it. It’s a good feeling to be going into games without the fear of a pasting and knowing we have players who are either experienced at this level or who are developing in a much better way than they were perhaps able to last season.”
Into this slightly unfathomable environment enter Scott Parker, stage left. There is reason to believe that this fits well. Parker has two Championship promotions. Parker has a defined style but not a dogma. Parker, with the greatest of respect, is not going to be poached by a superclub. This doesn’t have to be a grand new age. It’s enough to just be a football manager in charge of a club.
Burnley 1-0 Plymouth Argyle (Tuesday 1 October)
- Game no.: 24/92
- Miles: 283
- Cumulative miles: 3,843
- Total goals seen: 57
- The one thing I’ll remember in May: The view from the James Hargreaves Stand over Burnley. It’s always that view because it’s the best.
It has also been a tricky watch at times. Against Plymouth, Burnley seem to be fine until they get to the final third, at which point everything breaks down. They subsequently draw 0-0 at home to Preston and have one shot on target. It’s a different team to the one I saw win 4-1 at Burnley on the opening Monday night of the season. Burnley scored nine goals in their first two league games and have managed five in seven since.
“There’s glimpses of what Parker wants us to be but there was so much upheaval around the latter stages of the transfer window, and a couple of injuries to key players, that it’s been difficult for him to implement what he wants,” says Greaves.
“He’s a very honest manager and I’ve been massively impressed with the way he’s handled himself.
“He’s aware that there’s a lot of improvements still needed but we’re largely winning games without playing well and are actually ahead of where we were in that brilliant Championship-winning season at the same stage. Yes, we’d like the football to be more exciting but we’re winning football matches and that’s not something we did a lot of last season.”
The psychology of all this is complicated. I speak to two season ticket-holding brothers outside Turf Moor who say that they would prefer to have one more year in the Championship and build towards a more realistic chance of staying up when they get there. But then they also concede that they want to win every home game they attend. You cannot separate the micro and macro strands.
The ideological paragon is that this all generates a glorious sense of freedom for supporters, a laissez-faire attitude to watching their team play. If they win, we’re happy. If they don’t go up this season, we can see the positives. Sit back and watch on, free from the haunting angst that exists when your team is fighting for points.
It never feels like that. Going to the match is not a utopia. The more someone tells you it might mean less, the more you let it mean. You are worried that the methodology isn’t right until the point it works, at which point you worry that it will get found out.
Rather than the freedom to see what happens, Burnley supporters are desperate to believe that their club has got this, that their club is following their planned path of recovery and growth.
Most of all, Burnley are looking to escape the suspicion that they have become a product of the game as much as a participant in it. You get promoted and get paid out, but cannot improve quickly enough to stay there. You come down with parachute payments and so dominate those without them.
Your players and managers do well and get their heads turned or do badly and you’re stuck with them, paying the price for ambition. You get promoted and the cycle starts again. You are the tenants of an odd ground between two divisions, kings of your own hinterland.
Daniel Storey has set himself the goal of visiting all 92 grounds across the Premier League and EFL this season. You can follow his progress via our interactive map and find every article (so far) here
from Football - inews.co.uk https://ift.tt/RcAXICa
Post a Comment