Burnley FC
Turf Moor
Harry Potts Way
Burnley
Lancashire
BB10 4BX
Ground: 89
Date: Saturday 21st September 2019
Burnley 2-0 Norwich City
Premier League
Attendance: 19,712 (official)
Burnley - 5 Facts
1) Burnley were founded in 1882 and were one of the twelve founder members of the Football League in 1888.
2) The club have twice been champions of England, first in the 1920/21 season and again in the 1959/60 season.
3) Twenty years after the second title win, the club were relegated to the third tier for the first time, with relegation to the fourth tier five years later. Then, at the end of the 1986/87 season the club were almost relegated to the Conference, surviving on the last day of the season.
4) The club returned to the third tier in the 1991/92 season, before earning promotion to the second tier in the 1999/2000 season. Since then, the club have been promoted to the Premier League three times: in the 2008/09 season, the 2013/14 season and the 2015/16 season.
5) The club won the FA Cup in the 1913/14 season, beating South Shields, Derby County, Bolton Wanderers, Sunderland, Sheffield United and Liverpool. The club have also reached the League Cup semi-finals on several occasions, most recently in the 2008/09 season: they beat Bury, Oldham Athletic, Fulham, Chelsea and Arsenal before losing to Tottenham Hotspur over two legs.
My Visit
When Norwich's fixture list came out in the middle of June, and after I'd decided to take the plunge and get an away membership, I initially had this coming Saturday's away match at Crystal Palace on my radar, with the 28th set to be my first Saturday back in Guildford for University. This game wasn't even on my radar, as a matter of fact.
However, this changed around a month ago when I noticed that some Burnley tickets had made it through the initial mad rush to buy tickets. This left me with a dilemma, as I investigated and noticed that Burnley was absolutely possible to get to on the train from Peterborough. So I could either do that, knowing I could definitely get a ticket, or leave it and wait for the Palace tickets to go on sale the following week.
In the end, I opted for Burnley, mainly because it will be far easier to get to Palace in the future than to Burnley. However, I also made the decision to guarantee that I get at least some value out of my away membership this season, as there was no guarantee I'd even be able to get tickets for Palace even if I tried to get on the ticket website the moment they went on sale.
With the decision having been made, I set about purchasing the ticket and ordering train tickets straight away, so as to ensure that I could get some at affordable prices. Then it was just a matter of waiting for the day to arrive, which meant a month of alternating between excitement and nervousness. I also soon realised that I would be absolutely exhausted by the end of that match weekend, as I would be heading back to Guildford on the Sunday (which is what happened, hence why I've only gotten to this blog entry today).
On the day of the match, we left the house at 10:15am and I was dropped off at the station twenty minutes later. I got some cash out, went to the toilet and got on the train to Leeds, which just so happened to be the train that most of the Peterborough fans were getting on (as they were playing away at Doncaster). Because of this, I opted to put in some headphones for the journey and read a book to pass the time (this ideally would have been a book I need for my course, but I'm still waiting on reading lists so I had to settle for re-reading Haruki Murakami's Kafka on the Shore).
The train arrived in Leeds at around 12:15pm and, after losing ten minutes trying to find the toilets on the station, I eventually took a seat on the platform that my train to Burnley was going from, eating some food and flicking through Twitter as I waited for it to arrive. It ended up being a few minutes later and was a very small, two-carriage train, which I just about managed to get a seat on. This made steady progress to Burnley Manchester Road, passing some absolutely lovely landscapes in the hills of Yorkshire/Lancashire on the way.
Eventually, the train arrived in Burnley just after 2pm and I started walking towards the ground, following the flow of people towards the ground. I made it there twenty minutes later and picked up a programme for £3, before heading in after a bag search. My drinks for the train back were confiscated as I headed in, so after a trip to the toilet I bought a hot dog and a couple of drinks in the concourse. I then ate the hot dog before heading up into the far corner of the stand - where my seat was - ahead of kick-off.
I took a couple of photos after sitting down, before quickly realising that I could barely see the near goal due to my position in the stand. As kick-off approached and throughout the match, I got caught up in the chanting of the rest of the Norwich fans, even as things went awry on the pitch.
After the previous Saturday's amazing and unprecedented home win over Manchester City, I was excited for this match and hoped we could get another win to well and truly get our season underway, but I was also aware that Burnley would pose an entirely different challenge to the one Man City posed, so I would have also been reasonably happy with a point here.
Here's a match report from the official Norwich website, which describes how we virtually lost in the game in the first fifteen minutes after being well and truly "Burnleyed":
Wood opened the scoring with a headed effort from an Ashley Westwood corner in the 10th minute, before doing the same from a Dwight McNeil cross in the 14th.
Daniel Farke named an unchanged side from City's 3-2 win over Manchester City at Carrow Road last weekend. As for Burnley, Sean Dyche rewarded Jeff Hendrick with a start after he scored the Clarets equalising goal against Brighton in match-week five, with Aaron Lennon dropping to the bench.
While clear-cut chances in the first half were few and far between for the Canaries, Teemu Pukki had City's best of the period with their first. Eight minutes in, the Norwich forward pressed James Tarkowski aggressively and won the ball off him in a dangerous area. You'd have put your house on one of the Premier League's most prolific goalscorers to find the back of the net, but Pukki couldn't get quite enough curl on his shot to trouble Nick Pope, who saved with his left foot.
Moments later, Burnley opened the scoring with an archetypal Sean Dyche goal. It was a well-worked set-piece, as Westwood picked out Wood from a corner kick, the latter hammering home his header for 1-0.
Daniel Farke was forced into making an early change for Norwich, introducing Moritz Leitner in place of Alexander Tettey, who had been carrying a knock in the game's early stages.
Following that substitution, Burnley carried on exactly how they had left off, with Wood finding the back of the net again for 2-0. This time it came courtesy of a McNeil cross from the left wing after Ibrahim Amadou had given the ball away for City. Wood lost Godfrey and headed in to double the lead.
Westwood was pulling the strings for the majority of the first half, and again forced Krul into action with a cross that Jack Cork flicked towards goal.
Norwich did look like creating chances on the rare occasions they were able to get forward, Leitner having to great chance to make an early impact after coming on with a long-shot from distance. Jamal Lewis won the ball back off Hendrick in the final third, a good spell of intricate passing followed, but Leitner's long-range strike crashed onto the post.
City began to grow into the game more in the later stages of the first half, but couldn't produce anything to show for it, with Todd Cantwell's header from Sam Byram's cross sailing over the bar, and Pukki's header from Lewis' delivery going wide.
There had been some encouraging signs from the Canaries in the first-half, but two moments of lapse in concentration defensively cost them, as they went into the break 2-0 down.
City looked lively at the start of the second half with Emiliano Buendia bending a shot just wide, but the theme of the first half was restored, with Burnley having the lion's share of chances.
Ashley Barnes played a neat one-two with Wood before curling a shot wide in the 60th minute, as Norwich invited a high press that they struggled to cope with.
Wood had a chance to bag his hat-trick on the 67th minute, but shot straight at Krul from McNeil's cross, before Farke sent Josip Drmic on to replace Stiepermann on the 75th after Leitner sent a shot wide of the post from long-range.
Leitner sent a shot from the edge of the 18-yard box just wide, but a clear-cut chance for City never materialised in the second half, with Burnley holding firm at the back. The Clarets saw out the final period of the match and took all three points.
So, a disappointing result for my first competitive Norwich away game in quite some time, but the day out was still enjoyable despite that, as I completely found myself wrapped up in the away day atmosphere.
After the match, progress out of the ground was surprisingly quick and I soon realised I would be waiting for up to an hour for my train back to Leeds. I killed some time by stopping at a Tesco between the ground and the station, grabbing another drink, some more crisps and some more sweets to tide me over. I eventually had a fourty-five minute wait at Burnley Manchester Road, followed by similar at Leeds (where I ended up talking to some Norwich fans around my age, while we were being goaded by a couple of Sheffield United fans).
The train journey back from Leeds to Peterborough went the same as the reverse, with me reading and listening to music to drown out the noise of all the football fans on the train (though I still heard people singing about cowboys and debating Brexit and Scottish Independence despite this). All being said, I got back into the house at around 10:15pm, had a bath, browsed the Internet for a bit and went to bed, before waking up at 6am yesterday to finish packing and leave for Guildford.
This Saturday, I'm planning to head to Colliers Wood United, followed by another trip in Combined Counties League territory to Badshot Lea's new ground on the 5th of October. These two games will be followed by a visit to East Grinstead Town on the 12th, and then by a game in the FA Cup 4th Qualifying Round on the 19th (Aldershot Town if they're at home, somewhere else if not).
The Ground
Turf Moor is a decent Football League ground, albeit smaller than most in the Premier League with a current capacity of 21,944. Each stand is seated, with two of them having support pillars obscuring views somewhat (including the away end, naturally).
As an away end, Turf Moor is much, much better than Luton Town, not least because you have plenty of leg room for if you ever sit down. Views also aren't as restricted, though if you are near the back you will struggle to see any goalmouth action in front of the stand (this meant that I didn't properly see either of Burnley's early goals).
Photos
nice
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