Burnley now know the fight they're in for
IT'S been a case of so near and yet so far for Burnley Football Club over their Christmas matches – but the Clarets now know the scale of the task in hand as the second half of the season unfolds in 2010.
There's no doubt that Burnley should have beaten Bolton Wanderers and were largely the authors of their own misfortune. There were a rash of missed opportunities which would have rendered the soft free kick given by referee Chris Foy, resulting in Bolton's goal, irrelevant.
Against Everton they competed well for an hour and the match could have gone either way before the tide turned in the Toffees' favour following Stephen Jordan's dismissal.
The left back will surely have faced Owen Coyle's wrath for the shirt tug that led to his second booking and hence sending off, but over the season I can't be too hard on him.
Jordan has had to work hard to win over a large section of the Burnley crowd and in many matches this season he has been singled out unfairly for criticism by some of them. In my book, he has had more than a few faultless games and is one of the players who has stepped up following promotion to the Premiership.
Although a tough battle to stay there now clearly awaits in 2010, Burnley ended the decade as they began it, with promotion to a higher division, this time to the highest domestic level.
It has certainly been a contrast to the struggle against oblivion through the 1980s and the degree of stagnation that set in at the mid 1990s.
Tellingly, Burnley have only had three managers in this time, Stan Ternent, Steve Cotterill and now Coyle, who have all had their part to play.
The Noughties have seen a mostly carefully managed progress by chairman Barry Kilby and the board.
They eventually overcame the ITV Digital money setback which threatened to destabilise the club and when they did gamble – last season, as the accounts released in December showed – it paid off at the last with May's fantastic promotion to the Premiership at Wembley.
It is a ride we should continue to enjoy. It's been great these last few months being talked about in the national sports press and regularly being discussed by Gary Lineker on Match Of The Day, for the first time (despite the TV cameras' famous run-ins with the abrasive Bob Lord) since the mid 1970s.
We're back on the collectors' cards again (do they still come with bubblegum?) - back in the 80s and even the 90s, I for one feared it was a state of affairs we'd never see again. Get chewing...
- A WORD or two needs to be written about the remarkable Jack Hixon, who died aged 88 on December 20.
Hixon's name has been lauded in football because of the conveyor belt of talent he unearthed in his native north east.
He scouted for Burnley, and for a spell was chief scout, for many years and discovered either in conjunction with Charlie Ferguson or on his own Clarets stars such as Ralph Coates, Dave Thomas, Ray Pointer, John Angus, Brian O'Neill, Jimmy Robson, Billy Ingham and Steve Davis, four of those mentioned going on to win international honours (Thomas after leaving Burnley).
What is truly remarkable about Hixon is that he uncovered talent of the highest over an astonishing period of time. Alan Shearer and Michael Bridges over the last 20 years were Hixon discoveries.
I once saw a documentary on the great man and he possessed the rare ability to assess what a footballer needed in any given era. He was never stuck in the past.
I doubt we shall see his like again.
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Weather for Halifax
Saturday 11 February 2012
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