Diary 22A Clive Holt Chats Part Two

           The Bob Lord Stand may not be that old but inside this room you feel transported back to an era that is long gone, the Glory Years when Burnley were Kings.

     In front of him on the tables set out in a committee-meeting type square were heaps of ring binders filled with the minutes of old board meetings. Clive is responsible for minute taking and the upkeep of these books. He dug out the first reference to himself when he had just joined the board. It was dated 4 August, 1986 and it was minuted that he had expressed the view that the club would improve its public relations during the season to come.  One thing became abundantly clear; that since that first ever meeting he attended, he now has his finger on every button at the club.

     Without prompting and quite out of the blue he spoke about Chalky White. I was flummoxed wondering who the hell is Chalky White. Turned out he was referring to Graham White the boss of the old Colne Dynamoes and Clive had been on the board when Graham White was anxious to use Turf Moor for his own team; and to actually buy the club at a time when the club was in desperate need of money. It was rejected, because the deal said Clive, was that Graham White would have wanted to be manager, and that was unacceptable.  Colne Dynamoes, at its peak was quite a phenomenon and was a team that was heading for the Football League. It eventually folded for various reasons, one of them being the inadequacy of their own ground, the reason why Burnley had been approached in the first place.

     Conversations drifted on to season 1994/95, a fateful season that ended in relegation. But two games still stick in Clive Holt’s memory. Those who endured that season will remember that Burnley were relegated by just two points. It was the games against Bolton Wanderers that he saw as particularly significant.  The home game against Bolton was as early as October and fans then could have been forgiven for thinking that the end result would be of no great importance.  It ended 2-2 but it was a contentious scoreline. Bolton equalised when John McGinlay scored. It came after a Bolton player had been injured and a Burnley player kicked the ball out so he could receive attention. Bolton then ignored the convention of throwing the ball back to Burnley and from the resultant throw-in, scored. To this day Clive remains indignant. And then the very last game of the season: away at Bolton a 1-0 win was thwarted by a last minute Bolton equaliser.

     Burnley were down. Of course it had been a dire season but those two results saw 4 points lost. On the coach on the way back, Holt in frustration and dejection shouted down the coach: ‘How many goals have we given away in the last minute.’  Mullen shouted back in despair: ‘Don’t you think I know that.’

     The season had been punctuated by demonstrations and dissatisfaction and Clive remembered one semi-funny occasion when the directors were advised to leave the building by the police after one particularly bad result and the road outside Turf Moor was filled with protestors.  It was a time when directors’ cars were parked underneath the Lord Stand. They were escorted to their cars, engines were revved, faces were set grim, the gates were opened, and out they sped in convoy, Beirut style, while the police and horses held back the crowd.  

    It was February ’96 when Mullen resigned after incidents when fans were viciously targeting him and his wife.  Chairman Frank Teasdale’s home didn’t escape unscathed either. They were difficult times. Clive Middlemass took over briefly and the board turned next to player Adrian Heath. Holt liked him:

     ‘He was a bubbly character, a nice guy with a nice family, easy to get on with, a leader and he was available. He was a top player and respected in the dressing room. He was in situ and money was an issue then, so it seemed an obvious appointment. He had a good assistant in John Ward. Funnily enough I still get a Christmas card every year from John Ward but he moves around a lot and I never quite know where he is. We had high hopes while Adrian Heath was here and wanted to keep him but then along came Howard Kendal offering him the assistant’s job at Everton. It was an unexpected development and came quite out of the blue. What I remember is being in Italy at the time and spending two hours on the phone from the dockside trying to persuade him to stay, arguing that it was better to be a manager in your own right, than an assistant elsewhere. It was a very expensive phone call.’

     It was Chris Waddle that followed Adrian Heath. The board were hugely disappointed that Heath had gone. ‘But that’s football,’ said Clive. ‘It happens and we were unprepared.’

    ‘Waddle was then at Sheffield Wednesday and was letting it be known that he fancied a player-manager role. He was approached by Frank Teasdale, accepted the offer, and when the announcement was made it was huge news.  Adrian Heath had demonstrated that a player/manager position was feasible at Turf Moor, so hopes were high that Chris Waddle would also succeed in the role.’

      ‘Pre-season was in Northern Ireland, with the political troubles over there still causing concern. As I remember   we had Special Branch on hand to add to the tension. I remember Chris asking one of the Irish coach drivers taking us to one of the games to slow down and the reply was typically Irish, ‘But I don’t know where the ground is,’ he said. ‘I need to get there quickly so I can find it.’ Our general feeling was, let’s just get there in one piece, even if we are late.     The players, to Waddle’s huge embarrassment, played his World Cup song on the coach on one occasion.’

     ‘It was the year Irish favourite Daniel O'Donnell was playing in the hotel one night, unbeknown to our players or to me for that matter. So, because he was such a heart-throb the hotel was under siege by dozens of middle-aged women as the players returned from training. Their faces were a treat for a moment as they thought, to their complete horror; these women were there to greet them.’

     Waddle was a stellar name back then; a ‘Diamond Light’ in fact, an instant attraction; massive attention focussed on the club and players in the dressing room were astonished at his arrival.  Fans couldn’t wait for the season to begin. But in fact it was a near disaster. 

     ‘Alarm bells started to ring in my mind very early on.  You only get out of any job what you put in and Chris was still a player in his own mind rather than a manager. Nor did he understand that his team-mates could not do what he could do with a ball and often were just not on the same wavelength or skill level.’

      Within six games Burnley were stuck at the bottom. It was the 11^th game of the sason until there was a win. At the halfway mark, relegation seemed a certainty.

     ‘Just after Christmas we had a board meeting, Chris did not come and instead he sent his assistant Glen Roeder, something that hardly pleased us. The week before that Roeder had attended a Supporters’ Club meeting with Chris and the subject of Glen Little had come up. Roeder very unwisely had stated that crowd favourite Glen Little was not fit to lace Chris's boots.  This incensed the supporters and the board. We, by that time were completely fed up. Only once in all my time as a director, has the board interfered with team selection.  We instructed Roeder to advise Chris that we expected to see Glen Little and Paul Weller in the team for the following Saturday.’

     ‘The next day I can remember a very angry Chris Waddell on the phone. It was early for him at just after 9 a.m. in the morning telling me we would regret that decision. They played and we won and for the rest of the season, it was never mentioned again. I think at the same time Chris realised relegation would not be good on his CV and started to play himself, and what a player he was, one of the best we have seen at my time at Turf Moor. Unfortunately he was not, in my opinion, cut out to be a manager. But since then I am certainly pleased to have seen him go on to make a very good career in the media, and is a very good radio pundit.’

     Relegation form became promotion form as the second half of the season saw a complete reversal in form so that the very last game of the season became a game that would decide relegation or not. When Burnley beat Plymouth 2-1 the Second Division place was saved.

     Just prior to his appointment Clive Holt’s wife had asked him: ‘Who’s it going to be?’

     ‘Ah Chris Waddle,’ he replied.

     ‘It won’t work,’ was her retort.  She was right.

     ‘Problem was,’ said Clive, ‘It seemed to me he was still a player, with a player’s mentality. So he tended to work what we might call players’ hours, which as we all know is hardly a full day. And he had media work that included in the summer World Cup commitments that would take him away from the club at a time when there was hard work to be done in terms of sorting things for the coming season. It was me that was seen as the one who provoked him into leaving because we had to ask him, did he want to be a football manager, a 24/7 job, or a pundit. And it was me listing the questions so that he saw me as the reason for his departure.’

     ‘I had written a list of items which Chris needed to change if we were going to continue with him, so that he would be 100% committed to being manager at Burnley. Frank Teasdale met him after the season ended with the list, before Chris went to the World Cup on media duty. Clearly this meeting was very frank and he could not agree to the list. I think it was mentioned that it was me that had prepared the list, so Chris Waddle blamed me for leaving Burnley.’

   ‘Frank Teasdale was going on holiday the following day so as a result of all that it was me that was tasked with organising the replacement, or at least drawing up the short list of interviewees.  It was almost a case of; well he’s made the most noise let him sort it. So I did and I had three criteria. It had to be someone who had been successful as a manager; someone who would work 24/7 as manager, and someone who had been there and had the T-shirt. And for me there was one stand-out candidate and that was Stan Ternent.   He was working at Bury at the time and had got them promotion twice as I remember. I made the list, did the organising and the list included Neil Warnock.   Neil came over very well as a very nice man, not the face you see in public. There was not much to choose between Neil and Stan but Stan got it because he was ex Burnley and lived in the town.  Although we interviewed Neil Warnock we never got to interviewing Sam Allardyce. He was at Notts County at the time and the chairman there wouldn’t give his consent. Sam though did ring up to say he would certainly like to be interviewed. Funnily enough a few months later he resigned and three weeks after that Sam went to Bolton. At that time Stan and Warnock had not fallen out. That came later and yes there was an incident at Sheffield United that involved some fisticuffs near the dressing room door when there was a set-to between Stan and Kevin Blackwell I think it was. Stan had a very nice black eye after the match.’

     ‘But I was only tasked with arranging the interviews. It wasn’t my sole job to appoint the new man. That was a board decision.  The funny thing was we were fined £15,000 for poaching; not Stan but his assistant Sam Ellis. But for me it was a well-spent £15,000 when you consider what Stan achieved and that great promotion. ’

     It was also Clive Holt who organised the building of the two new stands in the late 1990s. Clive laughed:

     ‘It was those two new stands that resulted in me needing a hip replacement.  As they neared completion and all the stairways were being installed I was going up and down those steps so often, it wore my hips out, is my recollection. It was largely me that argued we should build new proper stands rather than just bolting seats onto the terraces which was certainly a proposal from one other key member of the board and that might well have happened if I hadn’t vehemently argued for something better. The contract price was £5.28million but we actually paid £5million. It was a design and build contract that simply meant a lot of the quantity surveying and design work was done by us not the builders.  We designed what we wanted and then it went to tender. For this we used the Booth-King Partnership building engineers and O’Neil the quantity surveyors. I, with Mike King from Booth-King and O’Neil himself then sat down to work things out in such a way that I had control over costs and any possible escalation.’ 

     ‘Six companies tendered and we did not choose the cheapest. Linpave of Lincoln got the job and everything was done in such a way that they had no charge on us for ‘extras’ as the job progressed. This is what often happens in building if you’re not careful but everything as it was added or changed had the provision that it was ‘included’ in the original price so that we had the paper evidence to show that. We’d kept to a very basic design that could be done quickly without complications with many of the ‘parts’ exactly the same. £2million came from the Football Trust, there were other grants as well, and the club made up the other 50%. Whether to build new stands or not caused huge arguments but the final ‘decider’ was the message from the Trust telling us that if we didn’t make up our minds, the £2million would no longer be on offer. Linpave then took us to the High Court for extra payments. We refused to pay, we won the case relatively easily with all the careful documentation I’d kept where any alterations would be part of the original price.’

      ‘With hindsight today I’d have a bigger concourse on the upper levels. We had more supporters at the higher level than the lower level for a reason. We saw them as better value seats. And, at that time we still had crowd trouble. Having more fans at the higher levels, we thought, would lessen the possibility of increased crowd trouble and should actually diminish it.  In general we have very little trouble these days, just an unfortunate few at the lower level.’

     ‘The other thing I would like to have improved was the basic design that would increase the atmosphere and noise levels. I like the seating designs at Brighton, but then all those years ago we did not and still do not have Brighton type money. But here we are high in the league at the moment! ‘

     The point about the noise levels was a good one. With upward sloping roofs there is no ‘sound box’ effect like there used to be on the old Longside in years gone by when the volume sometimes was truly awesome.

     Conversations turned to the club at the moment. Of course everyone was delighted to be back in the top spot (at the time of writing). Everybody was cautious but the view was expressed that if the club did indeed go up; how much better it would be as an ‘automatic’ from the point of view of having the extra few weeks to plan for the new season. Having been there once, the club now knows what would ‘hit them.’

     ‘We had so little time back in 2009 and so much to do. Much of what we did then in terms of refurbishment would stand us in good stead but there are yet more new regulations regarding Premier League dressing rooms so that more work would be needed there. But the planning permission we obtained for a new purpose-built block in the empty corner between the Hargreaves and the McIlroy stands is still active. However, that’s something that couldn’t be completed overnight and would not be cheap. We might also need an indoor training arena at Gawthorpe that could cost up to £2milliom, new extra dressing rooms and new pitches’  

     Whilst we chatted, extensive roof repairs were going on at the Cricket Field Stand end:

     ‘The stand is a quandary. The current roof repairs are costing £100K plus. That’s a big chunk of money but it just has to be done. There are health and safety wind strength limits that come into play if it stays unrepaired. This is currently 63mph and that reduces by 10% each year unless it is fixed so then you are into game postponements which then creates catering wastages and corporate losses.  Because of water ingress there is damage to rooms below and in particular to the electrics room so there are further repair costs there.  And then, what do we do if there is promotion to the Premiership? There’s a decision to be made about leaving it solely as an away stand that will sell out with the visits of the big local teams like City, United, Liverpool and the other well supported teams from further away. Or do we do what we did last time and allocate a section to home supporters. Yes, there’s the extra income but because segregation becomes an issue then there’s more to pay for police and stewards so you lose some of the gains. With 18000 seats in the 3 sides for home fans it might be best to use CFS for the away fans. It might not suit some but it is safest and gives the club the best return and income to put back into the team.’

     And then came what was almost an appeal about the dissatisfaction and frustrations that are being heard in the ground on a matchday. These were sentiments felt right through the club.

     ‘The Bob Lord is particularly bad because it’s so close to the manager and the bench. Everything is audible to Sean Dyche and his players. Can people not get off the team’s back and help them? We’re top of the league for goodness sake; what good does it do to moan and groan? How on earth does it help? If there is a lull in play then you can hear every word clearly and some of it is hurtful.  It takes guts to go out there and play especially if you know you are not a ‘crowd-darling’ and your every mistake is going to be picked on.  How can you go out there and perform? How can the manager blood youngsters in this kind of atmosphere. If you’re a youngster it’s downright daunting. Sometimes you just have to accept a poor pass or a mishit shot. ’

     This second get-together lasted a couple of hours again and at the end we touched on Danny Ings and the loan situation. There had been no direct enquiries about him from anybody. But we all know how it works. A manager has a tame journalist who writes stuff geared to unsettling a player and who knows if that isn’t going on now? And loans: on the very last day of the loan window, there were 4 strikers that the club targeted. But, young up and coming players from the top Prem clubs wanted guaranteed playing time. There was also a clear concrete example of the frustrations. Yes, there was a class striker Burnley wanted and offered to pay his club £6,000 a week for the loan. But, his manager did not want him to go to a rival team at the top end of the division and vetoed the deal.  So, that same player was loaned to a bottom half club for £3,000 a week.’

     The agreement was that I would not name the player or club but suffice it to say we would have been well pleased. It didn’t happen. How frustrated do we the fans become? Magnify that 100 times for the directors and Sean Dyche. Huge efforts were made to strengthen but obstacles were met at every turn. Such is football.