From The Edge Part 4: The Team of the Seventies

 By colinwaldron

Saturday 15th August 1970, the opening day of a new season and the dawn of a new chapter in the history of Burnley Football Club, Liverpool were the visitors to Turf Moor for the 1st game.

Towards the end of the previous season, Jimmy Adamson had been appointed the new Burnley Manager and Harry Potts had moved into the role of General Manager and despite injuries to Dobson, Mellor and Casper, Adamson was bullish in his notes about the clubs fortunes.

Typed in bold he wrote:

"Burnley Football Club is on the threshold of a most exciting period in its history. The players are convinced and so am I, that we will emerge as the team of the seventies".

He concluded, also in bold:

"Despite what has happened, we are ready to meet the challenge and make this a season to remember."

Burnley had the youngest squad of players in the football league. The Liverpool match was lost 2-1 and it was the end of October, following a run of 14 games before we registered our first league victory, with a 2-1 home win over Crystal Palace.

With a start like that, we were always chasing the pack and relegation was inevitable; a 3-0 loss to Oxford in the 3rd round of the FA Cup compounded a miserable season for the Clarets. Instead of being a season to remember, it became a season to forget.

From my own football playing perspective, the previous year I had to put my football on hold as I had landed my first job as Trainee Manager with the Co-Op, and for that 12 months I was based at the big Co-op supermarket they had in St.Helens town centre, so my football was on hold.

I was assigned to an old timer who was the Provisions Manager, a kindly man named Charlie Owen, and what he didn’t know about the trade wasn’t worth knowing. I can remember my first job was to cut open the sacks which contained the sides of Danish bacon and wash off the maggots with saltwater (still fancy that bacon buttie?).

At times in between deliveries when we would be running short on sausage or cooked meats, I would be despatched down to our Provisions Depot on the other side of town to collect more stock. No not in a van but on a sit up and beg push bike. It was painted black with a sign advertising St.Helens Industrial Co-operative Society on a panel attached to the bike under my legs. It also had a huge wicker basket at the front and I’m sure that scene of Granville riding the delivery bike in Open All Hours was based, on someone seeing me on this thing! Honestly I was even wearing tank tops at the time!

Charlie was a real character and when we had a lull in proceedings he would say to me "get your knife and follow me"; "where are we going?" I would ask, and he would reply "market research" and off we would head to the one of the huge refrigerated units which stored the cooked meats and cheeses. Once inside he took hold of the knife and edged chunks out of the boiled hams, roast porks and cheeses; we would have quite a feast, then he would finish with, "Yes I can definitely recommend that to the customers".

It kept me going till tea breaks, but they were a nightmare, we had to go for our breaks in shifts and I was on the first one and I was the only guy in a room of 20 or so women! They used to rib me something terrible, and without my time working at Dave's, I reckoned I would have been permanently red-faced!

Both mum and Dad were keen on Crown Green Bowls and Dad used to run the Templegate Doubles tickets (a kind of raffle draw based on horse racing selections) to raise money for the Bowling Club. Since being a teenager my job had been to collect the tickets from the printer and deliver them to various committee members who would then sell them. One of the deliveries took me to someone who had a daughter who caught my eye!

It was Christmas Eve 1971 and the girl at the party, was that same girl who had caught my eye. It snowed heavy that Christmas Eve and I offered to walk her home, she agreed and on Boxing Day I was due to play in a football match and she came along to watch; later we talked and the rest has been almost 35 years of history!

In September 1972 a year before the wedding, a group of mates had persuaded me that we should spend a fortnight in Benidorm as a last 'single mans' holiday.

My best man to be was Jimmy Foster, who fancied himself as a cool dude, somewhere between Frank Sinatra and Clint Eastwood. Jimmy would sit on the beach under a palm tree wearing a sombrero and a poncho (made out of an old curtain), and acigar out of the side of his mouth. He looked anything but cool, however it did have a desired effect, as no one would come anywhere near him or us and we had loads of space on the beach.

Dressed up in his Clint outfit, Jimmy set off one day by himself to go horse riding, he was away for hours and we started to get a bit worried, eventually a bedraggled Jimmy staggered back into the hotel bar and gave us his account of events:

"It was a hell of a walk to the ranch, and on arrival I paid my fee and the owner then gets out a large leather bag of red wine and we drink loads from it."

"He then goes to get the horses ready and leaves me with more wine. When the horses are ready there is a big one and a smaller one, I go to get on the smaller one, but the guy shouts no and he gestures to me to get on the big one."

"With help I eventually manage to get on, and after we have gone a short distance my horse decides to turn around and head back to the ranch. The guy on the smaller horse comes after us, but he is not fast enough to catch us up; my horse bolts towards the stable, which has a door with a top and bottom opening, with the top one closed, I decide I have to jump off to the side and fall into the dirt; the guy comes along, dusts me down and offers me more wine!"

With only his pride hurt, everyone in the bar is in fits of laughter, we all however did makes asses of ourselves some days later when we emulated Jimmy’s horse riding exploits with our donkey ride (see photo).

By season 1971/72 I was playing my football at St.Helens Town and Burnley where playing theirs in Division 2. It was 1972/73 that we finally bounced back, winning the Second Division Championship, a Colin Waldron goal from 30 yards secured a point and the Championship at Deepdale.

We spent 3 seasons back in the top flight with our best top half finish in 1973/74. The following year, we fell at the FA Cup semi final stage to Newcastle at Hillsborough; more disappointment followed the next season however and we were relegated back to the 2nd Division.

We never regained those dizzy heights and following that relegation and 3 mid table finishes the team of the seventies ended up being relegated to the 3rd Division at the end of the 1979/80 season.

Jimmy Adamson left the club in January 1976; Joe Brown, Harry Potts again, then Brian Miller all had spells as Manager to stem the slide.

On reflection perhaps the most disappointing aspect of the Adamson team of the seventies remark in 1970, was that the youth team in that season reached the FA Youth Cup Semi Final, losing in an extra time replay to Cardiff. In earlier rounds we had disposed of Liverpool, Blackburn Rovers, Manchester United and Hull City

Players that featured in that team were: Bradshaw, Brenan, Falconer, Harris, Ingham, James, Morris, McMahon, McNamara, Parton, Rodaway, Welch and Wilson.

Only a handful went on to contribute in any significant way to the Burnley cause in the future and it seems crucial to me that the production line that had brought the club so much success in the sixties, was unable to provide that talent for "the team of the seventies."

Take Care,
Next up: Into the Eighties

colinwaldron
28/6/2006