Burnley v Fulham 1980

[giveusaB]

Alan Stevenson playing his 300th game and Peyton in goal for Fulham.Snow on the pitch and on the bee hole terrace.

https://youtu.be/jeeKj8lZuEA

[Silkyskills1]

The week previous we'd lost to Bury at Gigg Lane in the 4th round of the FA Cup, 1-0 in front of over 17,000 where none of the team covered themselves in glory. Dreadful performance.

[ClaretTony]

This was the day that Bob Lord threw the Fulham chairman out of the ground at half time

[giveusaB]

What for Tony?

[Herts Clarets]

I was stood on the corner of the Bee Hole and Longside lobbing snowballs at Gerry Peyton. Well in the general direction, landed a long way short.

[Dark Cloud]

The week previous we'd lost to Bury at Gigg Lane in the 4th round of the FA Cup, 1-0 in front of over 17,000 where none of the team covered themselves in glory. Dreadful performance.

Strangely enough I don't remember this Fulham match, but I do remember the Gigg Lane cup tie which you say was the week earlier. Bury was packed with Clarets and the team contrived to not turn up and lost 1-0 as mentioned. One of the many, many low points during our "wilderness years".

[ClaretTony]

What for Tony?

They had some sort of bust up but Lord never liked him and told him to leave. His name was Ernie Clay. I never did know what the problem was but Clay was unpopular at Fulham. He'd also replaced Tommy Trinder as chairman and Trinder was a good friend of Lord.

[Silkyskills1]

Strangely enough I don't remember this Fulham match, but I do remember the Gigg Lane cup tie which you say was the week earlier. Bury was packed with Clarets and the team contrived to not turn up and lost 1-0 as mentioned. One of the many, many low points during our "wilderness years".

Thousands turned up to support us but as you so aptly put it 'the team contrived to not turn up'. A very cold day and icy pitch similar to the one at Sheffield Utd. in '93 but it was obviously the same for both teams and only one was seemingly prepared to give it a go.

[Quicknick]

I don't remember going to the Fulham match, but I'd driven up to Bury the week before from college in the Potteries.

[Mondsley]

Played on the day my mates twin boys were born. Poor excuse for missing the game by him I thought!

[mikeS]

A Bit more information here on the feud between Lord and Clay.



From: White Noise:
http://www.independent.co.uk/sport/foot ... 09418.html

Bull elephants battle eclipses James v Faldo feud


By Graham Kelly


Monday, 17 July 2000

It's quite startling that the gentlemanly game of golf has been set alight by the dispute between Nick Faldo and Mark James following the Ryder Cup captain's comments about six-times major winner Faldo in his autobiography.


It's quite startling that the gentlemanly game of golf has been set alight by the dispute between Nick Faldo and Mark James following the Ryder Cup captain's comments about six-times major winner Faldo in his autobiography.

Having worked in football for more than thirty years I have some experience of feuding sportspeople.

When the Football League Management Committee agreed to sell league football to Michael Grade's London Weekend Television in 1978, Jimmy Hill, then doubling as Coventry City's managing director and BBC TV Match of the Day pundit, publicly accused the League of the worst sort of football hooliganism by secretly concluding a contract with LWT at the same time as negotiations were supposed to be proceeding with the joint BBC/ITV team.

The management committee all commenced legal proceedings against Hill for defamation, which he stoutly resisted. Eventually the committee members all died off, to leave one, president Jack Dunnett, holding the baby and the dispute fizzled out.

Round about the same time, one of the protagonists, Bob Lord, the chairman of Burnley Football Club and vice-president of the League, was fighting another battle of a similar nature. He had become entwined in a bitter personality clash with the chairman of Fulham and long-time tilter at windmills Ernie Clay. Clay had got up the League's nose a decade or so earlier, when he had financed George Eastham's fight against the football establishment which led to the abolition of the maximum wage. Clay v Lord was like two mighty bull elephants locking horns; both had the memory of an elephant. Lord was a big man with a ruddy face and a centre parting. Clay was an equally large chap with a sandy crewcut.

Clay had a quixotic turn of phrase and, during the course of this smouldering row, he went on radio and called Lord and FA Chairman Sir Harold Thompson two "screws!" Presumably be meant they were bent and therefore unqualified to sit in judgment on Fulham, who had exceeded permitted payments by installing George Best in a luxury flat on his return from the North American Soccer League.

When Fulham travelled to play at Turf Moor, Clay was spoiling for a fight. At half- time he paused at the top of the steps leading from the directors box and made some disparaging comments about the referee along the lines of "Poor sod can't win in front of the chairman of the referees committee." Lord, for whom the word "autocratic" seems massively inadequate, had the comments immediately reported to him just as Clay had planned and the Burnley butcher walked straight into the trap calling Clay a liar in front of other guests and throwing him out of the boardroom.

Clay boarded a train back to London, but not before regaling all the reporters present with the story to the severe embarrassment of Lord, whom the Fulham chairman then subjected to a formal complaint. Needless to relate, the complaint was dismissed by the League.

Bob Lord was an old-style football club director, one of the local businessmen made good who so widely featured in the administration of English football before the advent of the more astute city financial type.

Not only did he chair the referees committee, he also ran the Lancashire County Football Association and various other influential committees. When Jimmy Hill, not unreasonably, proposed that the FA release their restrictions on directors' pay, Lord voted against his fellow League chairmen and it was darkly suggested he couldn't afford to give up all his expenses for a regular fee.

A somewhat similar throwback is Charlie Dempsey, the erstwhile Oceania president whose abstention in Zurich sent World Cup 2006 back to Germany. Some years ago, relations between Dempsey and the Australian Soccer Federation were so strained that ASF president Dave Hill labelled Dempsey "Steptoe" thus provoking a fierce complaint. Hill gleefully refused to apologise.

The cardinal rule of sporting feuds is never to be caught in the middle of them. You won't get any thanks and you run the risk of exacerbating an already fraught situation.

This was demonstrated to me graphically in the case of Venables v Sugar, whose argument made the row between Clay and Lord seem like a playground spat. It seemed to me that my pleas for settlement were taken by Alan Sugar as partiality by the Football Association on behalf of its England coach.

Similarly, the lesson was reinforced by the flare-up between Ian Wright and Peter Schmeichel. No amount of persuasion would force the Dane to make anything like a concession to what, had he been proven to have uttered a racist epithet, amounted to criminal conduct. The best that could be done was to issue a weak statement in which both players gave assurances there was no feud between them.

The dispute between Faldo and James seems quite tame in comparison.