Bob Lord, one of football's most controversial figures, died at lunchtime yesterday after a long illness. Lord, aged 73, was a director of Burnley for 30 years and the club's Chairman from June, 1955, until last October, shortly after selling his shares. He was the senior vice-president of the Football League.

Popularity was not Lord's strong suit. In fact, his choicest insults almost merit a league table of their own. The Jews who run television, he said, were trying to obtain soccer on the cheap. Manchester people had too much sentiment about Manchester United after Munich. Manchester United played like teddy boys. Most players he knew couldn't run a chip shop, let alone a football club, and no more than 10 per cent of them knew the laws of the game.

The slam of a boardroom door was a sound familiar to him, signalling as it did a guest's premature departure, or his own, and the smattering of Latin he knew he applied to journalists: Persona non grata. He banned the Daily Mail, among other newspapers, from the Burnley press box, an act that prompted that pussyfooting columnist J.L.Manning to tell him to go to blazes.

But the type of director Lord reviled for approaching the job as a pleasant social function could never have kept Burnley in the First Division for as long as he did. When Montgomery asked him how Burnley, with a population of little more than 80,000 could achieve such prominence in football, Lord's answer implied that qualities similar to those that conquered Panzer divisions were required.

His first command was, in fact, a horse-drawn cart, from which he sold meat. He bought out his boss at 19, advanced the business with contracts to supply the town's 59 schools, and survived several court actions, including charges of selling mutton dressed as lamb. He ran his football club like a sausage factory. Players arrived young, many of them from the North East, were processed with care, with the best, almost inevitably, sold later to the highest bidder. As the Chairman, Lord emphasised that Burnley did not sell merely to survive, but to survive in the First Division, a status they maintained long after the likes of Preston, Blackpool, Blackburn and Bolton had buckled under financial pressure.

Eventually, of course, players like Jimmy McIlroy, Jimmy Adamson, Ray Pointer, Ralph Coates, Dave Thomas and Leighton James became harder to find. Wages and transfer fees continued to escalate, and in 1974 impressive ground improvements reached the point where the �300,000 Bob Lord Stand was opened amid cries of anguish and derision. Burnley were all dressed up with nowhere to go but down.

Suddenly, the man who fought for ten years for a seat of power on the League Management Committee, found his personal soccer empire crumbling until all that remained was a glossy, empty shell. Some would argue that it was what he deserved, this arrogant butcher who told those who displeased him they were muck under his nose.

But that would be to ignore the admirable gains Lord achieved for football in this country during his rebellious period of the late 1950's and early 1960's, when he attacked the establishment for failing to keep pace with evolution. "Nothing was done between 1920 and the Second World War," he would say. "And after the War there was stagnation for many years."

How cruel that even he should be overtaken by events.

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