Jimmy Adamson by Dave Thomas

Author:Dave Thomas
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Pitch Publishing
Published: 2013-06-15T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 11

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IT IS funny that the favourite period I have of football at Burnley dates back to a time when the team came so close to being triumphant, but eventually failed, and they won nothing – except legions of admirers. It was a period that began at the start of the Adamson promotion season of 1972/73 and ended in March 1975 when by then the effects of player sales ended all real ambition. But in between it was a magical time. There was a group of players that came so tantalisingly close to perfection and it was just such a good time to be around Turf Moor. Those players were of my own generation and I could dream and muse that it might have been me out there.

‘The Team of the Seventies’ ... I felt like I was one of them. I can still see the most perfect display of passing football in a game in what seemed like 90 degrees at a sweltering Molineux and a 2-0 win. I was there at Elland Road for the 4-1 victory over Leeds United and a Christmas 2-1 home win over Liverpool. I remember bumping into a group of college friends I hadn’t seen for years behind the goals at Burnley (I now see them regularly, and we’re all growing old together). There were still the meat and tatie pies at my mother’s house and by now, as a bonus, she had stopped dropping the cigarette ash into them.

If I had to choose a decade to re-live I’m pretty sure it would be the 1970s. We were free of children; they hadn’t arrived yet. My career was taking off and I was a deputy headmaster. We had money in our pockets and went out for a meal every Friday night – ah, the height of decadence – a schooner of sherry, steak and chips and a bottle of Mateus Rose at a Berni Inn (only those of a certain age will remember them) and we thought it was the peak of sophistication. Every day was a gift and the sun seemed to shine every day – or at least it seems so now. Nostalgia I suppose at its most blinkered. Colin Waldron was voted the best-looking player in football and we thought ‘wow’ when it transpired his favourite meal, in a magazine article, was steak au poivre, at a time when most footballers would have said egg and chips. His best pal Paul Fletcher still rags him that he had no idea what au poivre really was.

In truth it was a turbulent decade, both at Turf Moor and in the outside world. The Watergate scandal was Nixon’s downfall in the USA, the IRA began their blitz on the UK, the USA failed miserably in Vietnam, by 1975 there was a severe economic crisis in the UK, Prime Minister Wilson resigned in 1976, almost amusingly there was the Cod War crisis in 1976, Elvis and Charlie Chaplin died in 1977 and in 1979 Earl Mountbatten was killed in Ireland by the IRA.

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