BURNLEY’S ELEGANT TREASURE
JImmY mcIlRoY, said matt Busby, ‘undoubtedly possesses something, which may be indefinable, but which is shared only by the alltime greats. Subtlety dominates his game.’
mcIlroy, who has died aged 86, was the elegant Northern Irishman who rejected suitors such as Busby at manchester United to stay with Burnley, win the league title in 1960, play 497 times in claret and blue and have a Turf moor stand named after him.
mcIlroy’s loyalty to Burnley became almost as celebrated as his talent. Busby described the latter as ‘magic, so often taken for granted’.
That was in the foreword to mcIlroy’s 1960 autobiography, penned by Busby, who added that ‘temptations’ must have been placed in mcIlroy’s way ‘ by those who feel he could have been a richer man in the colours of one of the “glamour” teams.’
It was a knowing remark: Busby had once sent assistant Jimmy murphy to make a surreptitious approach to mcIlroy, just as the manager of Sampdoria did on the morning of the 1962 FA Cup final between Burnley and Tottenham. Both ended in failure, although the Italian job offer produced one of the great Jimmy mcIlroy stories.
Sampdoria, he said, ‘promised me all sorts — a villa overlooking the mediterranean, an international school for my children, wages way beyond what I was getting in England.
‘I went back to the hotel and told my wife. She said to me: “Sure, but why would we want to leave Burnley?”’
mcIlroy agreed. He stayed at the club for 13 years.
Born on the outskirts of Belfast in 1931, with five sisters, Jimmy was the only son of
Harry, who had been on the books of northern Irish League club distillery.
McIlroy joined rival Belfast club Glentoran and, at 18, found Burnley manager Frank Hill at his home. An £8,000 transfer was concluded.
As happened then, McIlroy boarded a boat to england with Hill and was soon in the Burnley first team. But the northern Irish teenager who would become synonymous with Burnley was unimpressed by his first sight of the old mill town — ‘the shawls and clogs of Lancashire’ — and for all the legend of loyalty, McIlroy asked for a transfer at 21.
this was declined by Bob Lord, Burnley’s infamous owner. Lord ran a chain of butchers’ shops and the local joke was that McIlroy had been given one to keep him loyal. this was the era of football’s maximum wage.
McIlroy knuckled down. He liked Lord and the Burnley manager Harry Potts, who were constructing a team around him and Jimmy Adamson. the Clarets were a top 10 club for a decade and won the title in 1960 with a last-day win at Manchester City.
this took Burnley into the european Cup, where McIlroy scored the club’s first goal in their opening tie against reims.
Burnley finished fourth that season and second the following year, so there was uproar when Lord then sold McIlroy to Stoke City. with Stoke, and Stanley Matthews, McIlroy won promotion to the First division. His last club as a player was Oldham, where he was also manager, as he was briefly at Bolton.
Management did not suit him, McIlroy was an independent thinker scornful of FA coaching orthodoxy. He respected Potts, however, and Peter doherty, the northern Ireland manager.
McIlroy won the first of 55 caps not long after joining Burnley and in 1957 he became the first northern Irishman to score an international goal at wembley — england did not play Irish teams there until 1955.
northern Ireland won and were developing into the team that would reach the world Cup quarter-final in Sweden in 1958. McIlroy played in every game.
His last international came in 1965, when he and George Best were part of the forward line in a 3-2 win against Scotland.
After retiring, McIlroy wrote for the Burnley Express and until recently was a turf Moor regular. He remained a treasure to club and town.