First day of the season. Five words that mean the world. Five words that let us breathe again. Five words that represent hope and radiate optimism; the sun is out, our shirts are new and anything can happen. We say we would be happy with mid-table, but secretly we think promotion is probable. It matters not that our best players have left since relegation – we like the look of youth. This is August, our month, one whose dictionary definition in our minds reads ‘noun: start of new football season.’ Even just rolling the word around our mouths conjures first days gone by and the fiery glow of chance.
Our Saturdays are back. If we are not at the match, we can listen and watch; 5 p.m. is the day’s pinnacle again, not just another time on another long day. Even if the football man or woman still has things to do, chores to complete, he or she can do them with the commentary on. From now until May he or she will be a happier and a sadder person, exultant like a baby with a balloon one week, inconsolable when it bursts the next.
This particular August I feel defensive of us football people. After Hinckley and all that, England were ritually ejected at the quarter-final stage on penalties, which was comfortingly familiar if nothing else. Then came the Olympics. People were allowed to enter that mesh hamlet I saw before the Orient game. Gold, silver and bronze made its grey heart blaze, a thawed mammoth. British achievement captivated. The Games as a whole hypnotised a nation. Watching handball at midnight suddenly seemed like a rational activity. In itself, that was fine. Delightful, in fact. Then they went for our sport.
The people and the press gassed lyrical about the evil of football and footballers compared with the Olympics and Olympians. Here were Corinthian titans running, throwing and rowing for the love of the sport, spurred by joyous and positive congregations of wholesome families in Union Jack hats. Set against them were voracious footballers, injury-feigning and philandering, berated by boozy hoards with bellies seeping from nylon. All athletes were smiling gorgeous role models like Jessica Ennis, all footballers brag-traders and fist-wavers like Joey Barton. In the Guardian, Geoffrey Wheatcroft wrote of the ‘incurable social disease known as Association Football’, which ‘sometimes looks like a game owned by crooks and despots and played by racists and rapists.’ Today, as I travel to Burnley I read the same newspaper’s letters page. It contains the following:
Geoffrey Wheatcroft reminds us that football is back. So is ‘wife bashing’. Our women’s refuge had no requests for space during the Olympics. We had six by Tuesday.
If I believed that football was a game played by rapists and watched by wife-beaters, it might dampen my August enthusiasm somewhat. But when Wheatcroft et al write of ‘Association Football’, they are writing of top-end Premier League, of multimillionaire players. That is not my game. That is a faraway outpost of the sport, one bruised fingertip. It is not the football that unites post-industrial towns when so much else is lost to them, and it is not Chester FC running themselves. Neither is it the football that acts as a social lubricant when I am at a wedding or in the workplace, straining for common ground. I could go anywhere in the world, a dusty African village or Sydney, and find a game or a barroom debate to join. Rowing and equestrian, incidentally, are none of these things. Yes, I can do class prejudice too.
These thoughts are jangling as my train passes through the Lake District, its speed smudging Wordsworth’s England. Luckily August conquers all. Burnley v. Bolton Wanderers at Turf Moor on 18 August, a compelling, history-scented proposal. I change at Preston where tribes of lads await their carriages to the new season, sampling the poetic delights of the timetable boards: Corkickle, Dove Holes, Flimby, Langwathby, Poulton-le-Flyde, Ramsgreave & Wilpshire. My route to Burnley fares well in the romantic stakes too, encompassing Pleasington, Cherry Tree, Oswaldtwistle and Rose Grove.
On the train, the heating blares and the windows are glued shut, which at least keeps the gossip in. Behind me two ladies in their sixties are nattering in heroically foggy Lancastrian accents: ‘’e smokes too much, ’e smoked on ’oliday, ’e smokes at ’ome, in that liddle room upsturz. Mind, ’e never smoked in Australia. Smoked when ‘e got back, mind. It’s no life.’ ‘You’re not wrong, luv. I sez to ’im last time I was thuir, I sez: “Kenneth, you have got to stop,” but ’e teks no notice.’ We skirt Irongate, the neat wee home of Bamber Bridge FC tucked between tracks and houses. ‘I sez you’ll get nowt at car booter for that. Give it charity shop.’ The land is lush, peaks and troughs, up to Accrington. We curve towards Blackburn’s red bricks and towers of old, churches, mills then minarets, a visual history. ‘I sez to Roy, I sez, “There’s a sale on.” ’e sez to me, “You never buy owt anyway. Let’s spare t’bother and stay at ’ome. You can watch shopping channel if you like,” he sez.’ After they leave the train at Hapton, I miss the rattle and hum of their conversation and hope Roy has put the kettle on. The train jolts into Burnley, above us the motorway, below us the canal, further topographic context. Burnley Central station is a bungalow with an added aura of 1960s asbestos and more recent moss on gravel. I take in its facilities – a fence and a bin – and leave. Ahead is the abandoned wreck of the Adelphi Hotel, a grand old haunted house with its eyes patched by chipboard.
In Burnley’s 1950s heyday, fans would splurge from the train and into the Adelphi. Wearing their claret and blue scarves over Saturday corduroy, they would gather here after steaming in from Colne, Nelson and even Skipton, over the border in Yorkshire. Ale necked, those supporters would walk downhill into town, sweeping hills above and beyond, choking chimneys in the middle distance. As they crossed an iron bridge their clogs and boots would clop and clank; many had come straight from the morning shift in mill or mine. On Yorkshire Street they passed under the nobbly bolts of the Leeds-Liverpool Canal viaduct and filed to their 2 p.m. destinations. Some went for a pint in the Miners’ Club, some into Fitzpatrick’s herbalists for red sarsaparilla, some into the butcher’s for strips of tripe, eaten from a greaseproof bag in the street. If they did not live in the town they probably worked in it or at least knew its every nook and cranny, past and present.
During the Industrial Revolution Burnley grew from a market town backwater to the earth’s largest producer of cotton cloth, and from 10,000 people to 110,000. Pitted in the dungeon of a valley its damp air provided perfect conditions for making cloth, and the Empire’s growing markets invited exploitation. There was innate artisanship among Burnley’s people, cultivated by centuries of spinning wool from the sheep that loitered on the hills above the town. Before breakfast, mills supplied the home market and for the rest of the day the world, went the legend. In their hundreds chimneys speckled the skyline like giant stone trees. Those who did not work in mills mined the rich carbon beneath their clogs – a number of Burnley’s mines were in the town centre. The Leeds-Liverpool Canal with its wondrous Straight Mile, shunted supplies in and exports out.
The work of the spinners, weavers and miners should not be glorified from distance, though its effects deserve to be lionised. The harm they put themselves in the way of helped make Britain rich, contributing the revenues with which Teesside steel built the Empire’s infrastructure. Their lives were hard. While the sun was still up in some other part of that Empire, the workers of Burnley would be awoken by a ‘knocker-up’ man. His job was to rat-ta-tat-tat with a cane on bedroom windows and stir the dirty-nailed sleepers within. Mines we know were dangerous, but mills too. Thunderous machinery bred a staff of lip-readers and turned many deaf. Oily machinery, air clouded with dust and wooden floors meant fire spread wildly and tragically. Burnley was predictably filthy on land and water, with bronchitis in children as common as nits. The same damp air that made it a boom-town withheld smoke and sulphur, concocting a gritty smog that reduced visibility to five yards.
When the First World War finished boom times turned to hard times in Burnley. During the 1920s Depression, unemployment hit fifty per cent and unrest bubbled. Cheaper foreign markets had taken jobs away. The Second World War saved Burnley by driving employment upwards and, when it finished, mill modernisation and pit nationalisation continued the trend. When Burnley won the league in 1959-60 though, decline had again begun to claw at the town. There was still the kind of work that merited those clogs on the way to the match – over a dozen working chimneys remained – and coal was still being wrought from the earth, but Burnley knew it must change or die. That same 1959, the one in which Luton lost the FA Cup final as Reginald Dwight looked on, the town pinned its hopes on familiar redevelopment plans based around a shopping centre, bus station and ring road.
Four days before the 1959-60 season kicked off – a faraway August with identical hopes and themes – the closure of the Benjamin Thornber and Son Mill was announced. Thornber’s had been in Burnley for a century, but was now to become another statistic among the 6,000 looms scrapped in Lancashire by the Conservative government’s Concentration Plan. Burnley’s players will have known about this grumbling malaise – most lived in the town and travelled by service bus to games. Over the next nine months they produced football that made the entire town suspend its woes. That town backed them in force. The average Turf Moor crowd of 27,000 meant that a third of the town’s population attended matches. The First Division average was twelve per cent.
Burnley had long cherished its team, residents of homely old Turf Moor since 1883. The club had a significant early role as leaders in the charge for pay and professionalism – they signed waged Scots and threatened to break away. In a town like Burnley, all labour had to mean a wage. The link between work and club was strong. Most Burnley players were miners or millworkers through the week, and when they won the FA Cup in 1914, thousands of workers went on strike to join the victory parade. Seven years on Burnley won their first league championship, going thirty games unbeaten along the way. Then as the town slid so too did the team. The pair have often mirrored one another. Burnley’s population declined dramatically, falling to 80,000 when the league was won again in 1960. That year seemed to mark the last of ‘old Burnley’ with mill and coal work still sprinkled around by the magic dust of the post-war boom, as such representing a final pinnacle for town and team.
The latter went out in style, renowned as they were for their princely play. Jimmy Greaves referred to Burnley’s game as ‘poetry’ and ‘smooth, skilled soccer that was a warming advertisement for all that was best about British football.’ Indeed, only Greaves’ Spurs matched Burnley in their swift passing, possession-oriented game, modelled on the methods of Italy, Spain and those Hungarians who destroyed isolationist England and instigated our identity crisis. It was a Burnley man, Jimmy Hogan, who instilled ‘push and run’ football in Hungary, the nation dedicating its 6-3 victory to him. The Claret and Blues were best friends with the ball, happy in possession and fluidly exploiting space when not. Burnley football’s pivot was Jimmy McIlroy, a sumptuous and languid centre-midfielder who seemed to stop all the clocks and find a pass. When no player was ready to receive, the ball was his hostage; as the opposition stormed the kidnapper, he released it into the captivity of pitch room. The Wolves manager Billy Wright admired the Burnley way, ‘every man searching for space.’ Theirs was an early version of Total Football with rigid roles melted away into a loose arrangement of barnstorming full-backs and centre-halves who could play a bit. Freedom was injected into their DNA. This team and their style left an indelible mark on those who saw and read of it while young. My own dad, then a young Leeds United fan, can still recite Burnley’s line-up of Blacklaw, Angus, Elder, Seith, Miller, Adamson, Connelly, McIlroy, Pointer, Robson and Pilkington. What a shame that for today’s young fans huge squads and high player turnover will kill the future joy of recalling notorious XIs, lounging over every syllable.
Each tier of Burnley team played in the same way, youth to reserve, training and matches. It was part of a progressive approach to training encapsulated in the club’s belting training ground, dug from nothing by players in search of a summer wage. Then manager Alan Brown recalled in Arthur Hopcraft’s classic The Football Man how, ‘The players got down to it – famous ones, like McIlroy and Adamson – and dug ditches with me.’ These, of course, were Maximum Wage days, days of scarcity for some players, and days when Davids like Burnley could compete with the Goliaths of wider Lancashire, Merseyside and London. Training was intense but pioneering, coaching advanced but clear. It fostered fiddle-fit players with speedy minds and super quick feet, whizz-kids from the Moors. Squad additions needed raw qualities that could be built upon, and they needed to be good lads; this was a close-knit team, which won and drank together. Their wives were a collective force to be reckoned with, influential and well known across town.
Two key figures built this Burnley, a club from an unfashionable Victorian town playing advanced football, the scarecrow in a spacesuit. Harry Potts had arrived at Turf Moor in 1937, a sixteen-year-old centre-forward who soon became his club’s No. 10. He became manager in 1958, quickly building on footballing principles laid down by his predecessor Brown. A fatherly tracksuited tutor through the week and a firebrand when Saturday came, Potts was loved by his players. The manager, who moulded his team on the training ground and quietly encouraged each player in turn at a quarter to three, was transformed by the whistle. On the touchline he headed and kicked everything, a bonkers street mime act. This could overspill: during a European Cup tie in Rheims, Potts became incensed at the home side advancing free-kick positions. He ran on to the pitch and retreated the ball himself.
Potts’ chairman was Bob Lord, according to Kenneth Wolstenholme a ‘fair man’ who worked ‘the sort of day that would make younger men wince’ and to Danny Blanchflower ‘a self-made man who worships his creator.’ Lord was elected in 1955, a lifelong fan and successful butcher, the paternalist Victorian town chairman after his time. Despite the time warp, many of his ideas for Burnley and football were undoubtedly progressive, or at least they foretold much of what was to come. It was his idea to upgrade the training ground and put emphasis on a youth programme. He supported the professionalisation of referees and abolition of the Maximum Wage, a rare trait in a chairman, and presided over the gradual upgrade of Turf Moor. He even flew his team to some away games. Yet Lord also resented supporter input (‘We don’t recognise any supporters’ associations ... My ambition is for the club to function completely without any money coming through the turnstiles at all. That is the road to Utopia’). His labelled ‘bluntness’ was in reality often plain offensive (‘we have to stand up against a move to get soccer on the cheap by the Jews who run television’). Lord’s humourless demeanour and habit of banning journalists for criticising his club meant he was, wrote Hopcraft, ‘labelled in print as “the Khrushchev of Burnley”, and insulting as that description was it had a certain physical aptness.’ He even sold Jimmy McIlroy, and that behind Potts’ back. McIlroy’s sale was the first of many. Lord’s stands, with their heated floors, were subsidised by the departure of talent.
If Lord’s means and words were often, in modern political parlance, regrettable, his and Potts’ results were wonderful. In the red-hot summer of 1959 they pokered Leeds 3-2 and scorched Everton 5-2. ‘Stand in with us for all you are worth’ wrote Harry Potts. Champions Wolves were destroyed 4-1 at Turf Moor. ‘The ball was on our side,’ said McIlroy afterwards. Only because he made it so. The FA Cup holders Forest were given an 8-0 seeing to, Bolton just the four. At Highbury, aristocratic Highbury, the mill boys beat the posh boys 4-2. Soon, top of the league Spurs visited Turf Moor. The pass-masters were turned past-masters. Two nowt to the Burnley boys. Still, Potts’ men were not perfect. Flexible football was open football. Gaps at Molineux meant a 1-6 defeat, and the Clarets faced a must-win at Manchester City on the final day. Win they did, 2-1, on fierce Moss Side. Back home in Burnley, Potts danced on the town hall steps and the hordes cheered Lord. Their men had lifted a town that knew it was on the precipice of decline. Potts and McIlroy had set out to see the people smile again. Mission accomplished.
The Adelphi’s old wooden sign swings in the breeze today, its faint pastels of two Fauntleroys ghostly. Behind this dead inn is Sainsbury’s where men wearing claret and blue shirts push trolleys, shopping first then the match. I walk downhill into town, my modern office-boy shoes registering no noise. Old mill chimneys still mark the sky like disused parentheses and beyond them are motionless wind turbines. The turbines are set on gentle hills, the kind of which surround Burnley on all sides, giving a secluded feel as if inhabitants are the inmates of an organic prison. Though placed similarly, it feels more isolated and secretive than Sheffield, as if it could not care less whether you knew it was there or not. I arrive at St James’ Street and the first buildings I see are humbly pleasant and intact Victorian shopping blocks with flats above. Their shops have kindly wooden fronts whose names swither between museum piece (Empire News) and modernity (Bibi’s Kebab and Pizza House). Behind the main row and about 100 metres apart are more mill chimneys, emphasising just how physically central industry was here. The last town centre mine only closed in 1971, the final steam-powered mill in 1982. All of these buildings are in chunky stone the colour of dirty straw. This quiet grandeur masks high unemployment and poverty levels. Burnley has finished mourning, but is still suffering. Its population level remains in decline and those who stay often work elsewhere. Rather than the refined and refurbished mainstays of lower St James’ Street, an abundance of dirt-cheap shops at its highest end tells Burnley’s truths. As I walk around I see children holding yellow and blue balloons pronouncing the opening of a new 99p shop. Its competitors will include Poundland, the Original Mega Pound Superstore and Wacky Pound, among others. Just as the penny stores of Victorian times are back, so too are the pawnbrokers. Today’s proffer DVDs, games consoles and furniture for rent. Furniture for rent in the world’s seventh richest country.
I sit on a bench, surrounded by hanging baskets, last night’s hardened kebab onions crunching under my feet. There is calmness here and a soft happiness that will always triumph over rented furniture. That, a thousand times more than the Union Jacks that line St James’ Street, makes me feel patriotic. These people have had everything hurled at them, but still stop in the street to laugh together about last night’s telly. Not that much has changed. Burnley is a perfectly decent place because of these people.
There are shirts of claret and blue everywhere in Burnley today. The club still belongs to the town, as it did in 1959, and to support anyone else is an act of treason. New shirts in August, bare arms before winter; all part of the gleeful first day ritual. When I see a child in full-kit (including shinpads) I know everything is grand in the world. In the Charter Walk shopping centre one such shirted man tells a flock of old ladies of his NHS woes: ‘There’s going to be a helluva a lot of suing going on, I tell you.’ Hereabouts occurred one of Burnley’s rebellious episodes. In 1842, the Plug Riots – a General Strike across Britain inspired by Chartism – reached Burnley. One report recalled how:
All the shops in the neighbourhood were demanded of their contents. The crowd made a special design upon Horatio Hartley’s butcher shop. Being well-stocked with meat, he and his brother armed themselves with knives and kept back the plunderers. The mob deemed it prudent to leave his shop alone.
Today in the market hall the butchers shops are being demanded of their contents again, albeit politely and from queues of nattering locals. One’s window stickers offer ‘Black pudding, hot or cold,’ another boasts ‘Tripe sold here. Honeycombe seam. Dark and Roll.’ Burnley Market contains the usual bright menagerie of sweet stalls, grocers and poster/print/flag stands, and a lively fancy dress emporium. It is busy, most units are occupied and the packed booth-like side cafes leave the air heady with gossip and chip fat. In a side hall an old boy artist paints the Burnley he remembers and 60p VHS videos linger unloved on a table.
Back on St James’ Street my nostrils guide me to Oddie’s Bakery, my ears towards the bandstand. Whoever is in charge of my Truman Show life is doing it again: a brass band. I sit, look and listen. They are a bit cheerier than a Yorkshire brass band, knocking out sing-alongs for the blue rinse crowd. A band member shuffles among us offering lyric sheets, and the conductor tells stories of each song. One involves an extended anecdote about ‘Ben’, a Michael Jackson record. An old man in a Disneyworld T-shirt heckles something derogatory about ‘that oddball Jackson’. Beyond the bandstand, more claret and blues swarm into twin corner pubs, nodded in by Robocop bouncers. I potter down backstreets and eventually reach the lapping waters of the Peace Garden, complete with Princess Diana plaque. Every time I read or hear her name, I think not of tragedy and the People’s Princess, but of football being postponed. In 1981 (that year again), as dewy eyes watched her royal wedding, Burnley responded to a Conservative government edict asking councils to spend money on civil defence by declaring itself a Nuclear-Free Council. The Peace Garden is a monument to their defiance. It is surrounded by serious Victorian buildings, built to enable the working class and keep secure its streets. The library, building society and police station assert civic order in a reassuringly deep northern voice. As I stand and admire them I catch the bass of Bolton fans arriving from Burnley Manchester Road railway station. ‘White army’ they bellow. On Manchester Road stand the pillars, porticos and frills of the Mechanics’ Institute and the town hall, further glorious stone elegies to Burnley’s buzz town years. At the Weavers’ Triangle the worm-brown canal shimmers briefly before turning still again. More claret and blues stare at their reflections in it and sup pints.
I walk from the peak of Manchester Road, hundreds of clarets and blues, peppered with whites, lumbering towards the match in front of me. It feels as if this town exists today for the football and the football only. Everything else is a side matter. It is a football town in which every road leads to 3 o’clock. Me and the August shirts reach Yorkshire Street and cross under the bolted viaduct like millions before us. On this road of yellow bricks Turf Moor comes into view, a hazy Emerald City. There is no eating of tripe today; just burgers snaffled quickly in-between swift ales at the Brickmakers’ Arms and the Turf Hotel. Off the main drag I walk through the guests’ door of the Miners’ Club and pay my 20p entrance fee. Twenty pence – take that, Luton. By the pool table is a monument to ‘Those who worked and died in the darkness, still loved the light’ – nineteen miners who lost their lives in the Hapton Colliery Disaster of 1962.
I order a pint of bitter and a ‘Bene ’n’ ’ot’. ‘It’ll give you strong stomach that, flower’ says the barwoman. A Bene ’n’ ’ot is a Benedictine liqueur with hot water. More Benedictine is sold in Burnley Miners’ Club than anywhere else on earth. It was a taste cultivated by the East Lancashire Regiment in the trenches of Normandy during the bitter winter of 1918. Today, their great grandsons and daughters lap it up. A proud barfly reels off the story for me, and tells me how ‘We’ve had them all here. Sky. BBC. Even a Canadian film crew the other week. That’s one of only two gallon Bene bottles in’t world. Other’s in’t monastery.’ The Bene ’n’ ’ot smells ever so slightly antiseptic and is the colour of a ‘sample’. Despite these unpromising medical beginnings it tastes marvellous – sweet menthol meets a brew made by Nana. Here’s to the Burnley boys in the trenches making their best of a bad lot.
The first day sun beams invincibly as I cross from Yorkshire Street on to Harry Potts Way. Both sets of fans are mixing easily despite the presence of police horses, which always seems to heighten tension. Many supporters stroke the gee-gees fondly as they pass. ‘I’ve got a tenner at 5/1 on you, cock,’ smiles a tubby Boltonian. The noises of matchday stoke up once more, a routine soundtrack blown on and dusted down like a photo from a loft. ‘Programmes. PROGRAMMES. Get yer programmes,’ then something intelligible from a half-time draw salesman in a bib, and solo male voices growling away the frustrations of Pools-free Saturdays. ‘Yooooouuuuu Whites.’ ‘Come on the Burnley.’ Those who have not seen one another since May shake hands and sometimes embrace in the street. Names are not always known, but once you have had a season ticket next to someone for a decade it is too late to ask.
I walk around the outside of Turf Moor, the ground that Bob Lord built. Only two of his stands remain, one named after him. Lord died a week before I was born, not living to see Burnley go up as Division Three champions in 1981-82. That was a temporary reprieve – far had they fallen since those halcyon days. In 1987, only the last ditch defeat of Orient preserved league status. Although the enclosures and food kiosks are named after Burnley greats, there is a strange lack of football’s former world for such an old ground, save for the painted scars of a disused turnstile wall at the far end of the David Fishwick Stand. That, though, is by design; Lord was, remember, a modernist. The innards of the Jimmy McIlroy Stand host ‘UCFB,’ which offers, apparently, ‘university degrees and executive education in football business.’ It is probably what our Lord would have wanted.
I turn a corner and spot a queue. Hundreds are waiting patiently for beer from the canteen hut of Burnley Cricket Club, whose ground neighbours Turf Moor. The far boundary brushes against the stand behind one of the goals; these Siamese venues were a Victorian entertainment complex. The whites of Bolton have commandeered the sizeable pavilion and a youths’ game played to parents this morning is now cheered riotously by the visiting hundreds. The roar that goes up when a wicket is taken inspires jubilant scenes in the slips, a glimpse of the big time long to be cherished.
Passing new stewards meeting for the first time I heave a turnstile into the Bob Lord Stand. At the John Connelly Bar I wait for my pint of Thwaites to settle and note that they too stock Benedictine, which beats even Mr John’s Portman Road brandy as a football ground catering surprise. Youth team players hover in official tracksuits, their first-team fantasies intact for now at least. I perch on a wall while two bulky Burnley fans who were born with plastic forks in their mouths pick at chips and talk about holidays. ‘You’ve been to that Sharm el Sheikh, haven’t you Steve? She fancies it but I’m not going over there while it’s like it is.’ ‘They wouldn’t leave our lass alone over there. Blond-haired, in’t she.’
From the dark of the concourse I climb into the wide-open light of the new season and am transfixed by the varnished wooden seats that pack the stand. These are working antiques, with their ornate brass joints as close to arts and crafts as stadium seats get. The brimming Bolton end has them too, though most in there stand up and glare distractedly on to the lush pitch.
The lull before the players enter the pitch is filled with songs from both sets of fans. This is all too perfect until the man in charge of the PA responds by blasting everybody with some unwelcome Foo Fighters. Thankfully, when the claret and blues and the whites stroll on even he turns things down. The players’ tunnel is located behind a goal, so the bench battalions must cross the pitch to reach their dugouts, situated in front of our wooden wonders. This allows cacophonous barracking of the away manager, once of this parish. ‘Joooooooooodas, Joooooooooodas,’ sing the boys and girls and the men and women of Burnley. Loyalty remains prized among supporters. To move to another Lancashire club is like shacking up with the tarty girl next door.
The sun climbs higher, visor arms move to foreheads and the season kicks off. From home and away the noise rises, amplified by the end of non-season boredom and the swagger of new season hope. The Wanderers fans in particular are strident, which they never seem to be at the Reebok. It recalls for me early 1990s trips to intimidating Burnden Park, and highlights that the best noise now is often made by away fans, and often the best place to watch your team is somewhere else. The racket transfers straight to the hearts of the players who begin frantically, passing quickly, tackling sharply and shooting wildly. It is all very English and very enjoyable. Wanderers, newly demoted from the big time, try to slow things and engage in the artful. A delicately chipped free-kick intended to be ornate backfires momentously, trickling out of play. The Burnley mobs jeer as one. Welcome back.
The treacherous away manager moves to his touchline, causing those around me to rise and bellow biblically. Not one of them looks harmful or readily violent and I reflect how, if they saw him in the street, they would probably engage in polite conversation. This kind of hostility seems more traditional and theatrical than the needless vitriol I have seen elsewhere, though perhaps the hands of my moral compass are looser following a summer far from the madding crowds.
Wanderers have an implacable mountain up front. Born in Sheffield, he is built for the days of shove the keeper and Ernest Needham. For nigh on a decade he has been the peak at which teammates have cast long passes and crosses like picks on ropes thrown into the snow. If he had played for Graham Taylor’s Watford he would have been a superstar. He was born after his time, but simply by refusing to change has earned opposition respect. It is not a deferential respect (this is football), but one detectable in the jubilant celebrations that greet the floppy-blond Burnley left-back who clatters him. Footballing respect is grudging, perverse and will never be admitted. Though his team do initially try to pass the ball on the ground, when no joy is found they seek his head. Burnley, with two narky ferrets up front, keep things concise. This is in contrast to their supporters, who in song manage to wring three syllables from the word ‘Burnley’.
Things become niggly as players wheeze in heat, which reminds them that the beach is only a few weeks behind them. Fitness does not yet match intention, making for late tackles and one or two circus moves. Two opposing midfielders try to outmuscle one another and end up resembling a pantomime horse without its costume. Short-hit passes are seized on (‘well read, lad’) and possession veers quickly between the sides, ending usually in a fit of pinball rebounds that serve to keep the crowd cooing and being unfeasibly grateful that football is back. In the neon frenzies of August’s first day, there is nowhere else to be. This is heartfelt football in which ability does not always meet idea and ball is not always taken before man.
Burnley begin to find their range, firing in a succession of long-range shots. One swerves and reminds me of the heat you see on continental airport tarmac. Somehow the Wanderers goalkeeper gets both wrists to it and bats it over for a corner. One of Burnley’s ferrets irks Wanderers’ lanky centre-half, snipping at his ankles and sniffing for crumbs. The home side are tenacious. When they shoot they follow after the ball and sometimes seem to overtake it. Such forcing and hunting brings them a 1-0 lead. ‘Jooooodas, what’s the score, Judas Judas what’s the score?’ sing those around me.
Wanderers kick-off, but Burnley again set about them. Away shoulders drop and most in white become guilty of propelling missiles in the direction of their big man. I look at their loyal army behind the goal. To a man and woman they are stood, many with arms folded. Last year’s tepid relegation stretches out behind them, the long season ahead in front. The half-time whistle goes and they are not sure whether to boo or laugh, so in the main keep silent. The man in front of me rises revealing on his seat an ancient remnant of floral carpet. I imagine he has had this since Burnley were champions. He reaches for his flask because it is never too hot for tea. Ahead of us substitutes thrash footballs at one another and on a pitch within the pitch school kids play the game of their young lives. In the gents, half-time analysis is curt. ‘They are utter shite,’ says one man. ‘I think we might go up,’ another.
The second-half begins with two free-kicks each in the opening thirty seconds and a purple butterfly hovering around us. ‘Even that bugger is Burnley,’ says carpet remnant man. Burnley force the pace again, though Wanderers strive to remind us they are alive with thudding challenges. The home keeper indulges in a short spot of keep-ups before floating a pass straight to an opposition midfielder. He has a clear run on goal and is bawled on by those behind the goal whose noise rises as he reaches the penalty area. Their sound crescendos like that of the paddock as an outside bet nears the finishing line. Wanderers will equalise, go on to win it and probably be top from now until May. He falls over the ball. A few minutes later Burnley make it 2-0.
The second comes when a cross is hoiked in and Bolton’s centre-halves and goalkeeper stare at the ball as if it is a difficult Japanese puzzle. A Burnley player nods it in to the gaping net. The new season is an hour old and the claret and blues have promotion in their nostrils. To the tune of Wild Rover they chorus: ‘No nay never no more/Will we play Tranmere Rovers.’ Across from us in the stand-edge nearest the away supporters, hundreds are turned towards their Lancastrian brethren, jigging and jibing. A few twirl their shirts over their heads revealing expansive stomachs. Jooooodas creeps forward from the bench to be met with cries of ‘sacked in the morning/you’re getting sacked in the morning.’ His instructions make no difference as Burnley continue to probe when on the ball and harry when not. Wanderers have lost their map to the penalty area and instead shoot implausibly. When anything looks like it might be on target, a Burnley leg, chest or head blocks it. It makes the away side lose heart, and even when they keep the ball their forays seem more like contractual obligations than investigative experiments.
Burnley inhale the pressure and strike Bolton on the break. Full-backs and wingers overlap and swap roles, the living ghosts of 1960. Their left-winger runs with one shoulder lower than the other as if pressed to the mill. As he labours three stepovers and lands another cross on top of the net, those behind the goal ponder the defeated away fan’s dilemma: stay to boo and see who claps us; leave and make the earlier train? Today’s Man of the Match is awarded to Burnley’s No. 8 who celebrates with a crunching centre-circle tackle that puts hairs on the chest of his opponent. By the referee’s third and final peep an almighty roar fills the air. Happy Clarets drift off into the evening sun and before long I am left alone in the wooden seats.
Litter blows across the players’ car park and the wind carries a scent of ageing burgers and police horse manure. Just after Yorkshire Street I cross high above a small stream and waterfall, church bells chiming a street or two away. I begin an uphill walk to my hotel for the night, passing the Duke of York pub, centrepiece of riots here in 2001. What were initially reported as race riots turned out, according to an official inquest, to be drug gang turf wars exploited by racist groups external to Burnley. Scapegoating and mythology allowed the British National Party to crowbar a divide. In 2002 they made their first breakthrough into UK politics in Burnley, winning three council seats. They were able to paint a town flooded by foreign invasion and bursting at the seams. In fact, this is an emigrant town whose population decreases every year. In council elections three months before my visit, the BNP lost their token remaining seat.
Along Colne Road Asians and whites inhabit the same space without mixing. Sharing social class and geography, they are silently bonded by having nowt. Some rows of terraces remain, some are boarded up and four of five streets have been bulldozed, rendering a crater of a community. Any sadness I feel is tempered by the sight of young kids of every colour hammering a ball about in the rubble.
The main drag is a mix of Burnleys – and Englands – old and new, both still breathing. On one side of the road are Byerden House Socialist Club and then Paradise WMC, on the other sari shops, halal butchers and a Polski Sklep. I imagine there is still tension, but there is also a pact of silence that is hopefully a welcome stepping stone to future integration rather than simmering resentment. Ten minutes uphill, I cross a road and things change. The houses are gradually larger and farther from the path. Eventually I reach mill-owner mansions now inhabited by tanned Lancastrians and multi-Mercedes Asians, both of whom have left their people down the hill behind. If one road on my travels is an exhibition of England’s narrative, then this is it. At this end, no one ignores his neighbours because of race, but because isolation is what middle-class people do. In this strange way does becoming bourgeois unwittingly fight racism.
In the hotel bar dregs of a wedding party slur their disapproval of the modern world. A Lancastrian businessman of sixty-three sits with his Mauritian wife of thirty-seven (I am not guessing this. He tells most who enter the room). ‘There will never be another generation like ours,’ he says to a Cockney man of similar age who looks and sounds as if he once managed Status Quo. ‘We pulled ourselves up by the bootstraps. Worked our backsides off. Not like this lot today.’ Quo replies: ‘I have this saying – “You get out what you put in.”’ I am not sure that is strictly his idiom, but I let it go. The conversation turns to which cars they ‘let’ their wives drive (Quo: ‘Don’t let her near the Bentley now; 35k of damage the bitch did’) and which nationalities they will not allow to rent their properties (Sixty-three: ‘No Poles. They are dirty people’). I leave hoping that indeed my generation is not like theirs and reflecting how, despite 1981 and all that, we not are Thatcher’s Children: they are.
The bus into town redeems my mood. First, we pass a horse and cart, then, a man in a flat cap gets on and tells the driver jokes that we can all hear. I walk by the Keirby Hotel, a dreadful concrete hive and the showpiece of that 1959 ring road renewal plan. It resembles a decrepit block of flats wearing a conservatory as a tutu. Outside the Bier Huis Claret sleeves raise toasts to 2-0. I seem to have arrived during clientele shift changeover, as all-day drinking husbands swap with dolled-up gangs of wives. They complete their substitutions, a peck on the cheek instead of a high-five. Ales are abundant in the Bier Huis, but even hops and oats do not fill my stomach. For some time I walk the streets of Burnley in search of food. The polished cobbles and thudding chain bars of Hammerton Street are empty of people. A small mill at the road’s end has been smartly converted into nightclubs called Lava and Ignite. Next to the canal, a rat runs over the shining night-out shoes of a man smoking outside a bar. I remember a conversation I recently had with my mum. ‘You’ve been to Burnley before, love.’ ‘Have I? When?’ ‘On that canal holiday. There was a dead sheep in the water. Or a cat. I forget.’ I end up eating my first McDonald’s in well over a decade. In my lifetime McDonald’s went from the height of exoticism (everyone my age remembers their first – mine was in Milton Keynes) to a hated symptom of all that was wrong with the world. It is now somewhere in-between apparently because it sells salads and tells you how pleasantly its cows are killed. It is bright, just as I remember it, and the servers still smile even though they would rather be anywhere else. I pity the young girl that serves me: the end of the drinking shift has brought hunter-gatherers in nylon Claret. After chips that taste exactly how I remember – a not unpleasant sensation – I return to the hotel feeling a bit grubby.
The next morning I cleanse my soul with a walk high above Burnley. I pass through an estate where children kick a flat ball in the road and one two-up and two-down has a St George’s cross painted across its entire front. As I glance down on this unique little place of bold stone, foreground chimneys and background hills, I see that Turf Moor is almost at the centre of the landscape ahead of me, which feels like its natural place. The club matters today as much as it did when it was founded. It matters even more than it did in 1959; it, and football, are things worth belonging to and believing in.