Ten Burnley games that brought a lump in your throat
I wrote about the following games some years ago so that since then there have been several more; the memorable away game at Reading in the play-offs when Burnley scored…
Burnley Cult Heroes
I wrote all these down some years ago. They are just choices and everybody will think of others more recent. Ashley Barnes definitely springs to mind. But it’s a funny…
1987 and nearly the abyss
1987: we’d lost two parents by now, my father and Mrs T’s father. The latter succumbed to the indignity of Parkinson’s and Dementia, my own father to a sudden heart…
Jim Thomson on Jimmy Adamson
The Daily Express was headlining severe arctic weather again when I went to see Jim Thomson in January, several years ago. If I could forecast football results as accurately as…
1955 – My father and Billy Gray
It was finding a copy of the February 1955, Charlie Buchan’s Football Monthly that set me off on this train of thought. It’s one of those wonderful, old editions with…
Beginnings
Who started it? What is it that lies at the heart of football and our chosen team, and keeps drawing us back like an umbilical cord? Who did this to…
Remembering Jimmy Strong with daughter Sandria Burkinshaw
An only child, I was born two months before my dad Jimmy Strong kept goal for Burnley in the 1947 cup final against Charlton Athletic where he would readily confess…
1953 – Year of the pageboy
It was the Coronation year, UKIP hadn’t been invented, I was as yet to visit Turf Moor, and they dressed me up in this ridiculous garb. There’s me, a normal,…
In the deep midwinter
I was only two years old and didn’t realise it at the time, but in 1946 Britain was to put it crudely, broke. People, my grandmother in particular, found it…
Victory at 41,000 feet
Been a few places in my time, done a few things, been around a bit. Here and there, home and abroad, from Bacup the land that time forgot to Bournemouth…