FLAMING CUSHIONS, DEATH THREATS AND THE MANAGER YELLED ‘RUN FOR YOUR LIVES’
Burnley’s European adventure in 1967 was one to remember
‘Europa League qualification would be a bigger achievment than that of the 1966 Burnley side’
THE last Burnley players to experience the competition now known as the Europa League will tell you it was not exactly a magic carpet ride.
The club’s final successful tie in such territory concluded with home fans in Napoli’s Stadio San Paolo setting fire to cardboard cushions and throwing them like saucers at the British players, and manager Harry Potts sprinting across the pitch yelling ‘run for your lives, boys’ at the end.
Under heavy police escort back to Capodichino Airport, the players were advised to put their coats over their heads and the British reporters present were briefly taken into protective custody. ‘See Naples and Die: Burnley almost did’ was the headline above local paper reporter Granville Shackleton’s breathless dispatch from the war zone.
And they’d do it all again in a heartbeat. Little did the Lancashire town know, as its players returned with the goalless draw which, after a 3-0 first leg win at Turf Moor, sent them into an Inter-Cities Fairs Cup quarterfinal in February 1967, that it would be 51 years before Burnley’s next European campaign. Beat Leicester City at home tomorrow — in a game which looks very much like a Europa League playoff — and there is a very good chance they will be back.
In all honesty, a tortuous journey through the foothills of a Europa League group stage is a drain on resources that the club would happily live without.
‘We’ve given (our supporters) more than what they wanted, don’t worry about that,’ said manager Sean Dyche, who was yesterday named manager of the month for the first time in the top flight. ‘They wanted Premier League football. Anything above that is just a bonus on top of a bonus.’ But that 1966/67 campaign, which saw Potts’ side narrowly lose a quarter-final to Eintracht Frankfurt after the Napoli adventure, demonstrates all that comes with the European experience.
The scene was set for what became known as the ‘Battle of Napoli’ after the Turf Moor first leg, when striker Andy Lochhead was kicked in the head by Dino Panzanato, who told the Scot, ‘I kill you when you come to Napoli’, as he was sent off.
All hell broke loose in Naples when Burnley’s match-winning goalkeeper Harry Thomson was spat at by Alberto Orlando after attempting to shake hands at the end of the match.
‘Tensions were running high,’ Dave Merrington, a 22-year-old Burnley defender that February afternoon, tells Sportsmail. ‘As we went down the steps under the stadium moat, one of their players slammed against a wall. He had tried to grab our reserve keeper Adam Blacklaw. Adam could look after himself.’
As Merrington and team-mate Willie Morgan, later of Manchester United, changed out of their
kit, two glass doors in the away dressing room smashed, throwing shards of glass across the changing area. The military police escort out to the airport included four troop carriers.
Yet Burnley cherished their presence in the tournament because it was testament to how, then, just as now, they punched above their weight with a shrewd, frugal approach to football.
The Fairs Cup was established in 1955 to promote international cooperation, featuring friendlies between cities who hosted trade fairs. But by 1967, four years before it became the UEFA Cup, qualification came through league positions and Potts’ team had finished third, behind the wealthier Liverpool and Leeds, the previous season.
Under the ownership of Bob Lord, they were ahead of their time in unearthing players. They bought the Gawthorpe Hall farm — their training ground to this day — and turned it in the 1960s into one of the most impressive prototype facilities of its time.
They established an exceptionally good scouting system. ‘There was an Irish scout, who recruited others from Ireland and got them reporting to him,’ says Merrington. ‘They did the same in Wales, in Scotland and the North East. The criteria was we had to sell one player a season to balance the books.’
The same ethos lies behind this season’s success, which will probably see Burnley — the smallest Premier League side ever, by size of population — finish seventh on a mere £37million wage bill.
There was a net profit of around £25m last summer, after sell-on payments had been made, with Michael Keane (Everton) and Andre Gray (Watford) heading out and Chris Wood arriving from Leeds United. This winter, there was one loan deal and Aaron Lennon’s arrival for £1.5m.
‘We try to work in three-year cycles and you want to trade neutrally,’ chairman and owner Mike Garlick tells Sportsmail.
‘Once you start to say, “Oh we’ll break even, that’s fine”, you can easily slip into a loss-making position. It can be hard to recover from that. We’ll always be a development club.’
The playing roster is more British than most and not so different in feel to the late 1960s.
‘It’s not that we’ve got a British philosophy,’ Burnley-born Garlick says, ‘but our recruitment department is not massive and we don’t want to spread them too widely because if they start looking at a European player and they’ve only seen them two or three times, it’s just not enough.
‘You’ve got to have seen a player live 10 times, done due diligence on them to death, taken up references with people they’ve played with in the past. How do you drill down and get that data on European players? It’s possible but it’s not that easy.
Of course, it helps that Garlick, who made his money from the corporate recruitment business, hired Dyche six years ago, 18 months after making Eddie Howe his manager. ‘Good management is about your relationship with people and unless you are able to manage and cultivate that you’re in the wrong game, quite frankly,’ Garlick says. ‘Fortunately, I’m used to recruiters who sell other people, so (hiring managers) is something I’ve got pretty accustomed to over the years.’
Merrington views the prospect of a Burnley Europa League qualification as an even greater achievement than Potts’ team making it in 1966. ‘Others teams had a financial advantage over us back then, but not to the extent of today,’ he reflects. ‘This would be a bigger achievement.’
That night in Napoli was like none other in his seven years at Burnley, he says. ‘It was frightening as it unfolded.
‘But we lived to tell the tale didn’t we? Those were the times of our lives.’