BAMFORD HAS LAST LAUGH AT BURNLEY

THERE are some footballers who once the ball struck the net would have wheeled away and run over to the opposition manager with fingers raised. Joey Barton comes to mind. Safe to say, Patrick Bamford is not Joey Barton. His equaliser four minutes from time not only gave Leeds a point they had scarcely deserved, such a celebration would have been laced with self-justification. Bamford had once, briefly, been a Burnley player. Sent to Turf Moor on loan from Chelsea in 2016 he scored no goals and suffered an abrasive relationship with Sean Dyche. Bamford had gone to Nottingham High School, where fees are more than £5,000 a term. English managers have long been suspicious of footballers with an education. Gareth Southgate avoided taking his A-levels because he considered they would give him too many excuses to fail at Crystal Palace. Bamford had an offer from Harvard University. Bamford said Dyche had thought him soft and lacking in commitment to the professional game. The loan was quickly terminated. Yet for much of the afternoon, Bamford was ineffectual. Had he not scored, he would still have been the story given his selection for England’s World Cup qualifiers against Hungary, Andorra and Poland. He struck the post before the interval but it was his own post as Leeds tried to clear a corner. His late leveller came as he turned home a misdirected shot from Jamie Shackleton. Bamford was the second player in the game to score against his former club. Just after the hour, Chris Wood, whose £15million signing from Leeds represented a rather more substantial investment than Bamford’s loan, was cute enough to deflect a ball home from close range. Dyche congratulated his players for preventing Leeds from ‘opening the game up and turning it into a basketball match’. He would, however, have preferred something more substantial. It may have produced Burnley’s first point of the season but Dyche would have fussed over the two that had been dropped.