One such day for me included an early-season clash with Halifax Town at the Shay Ground in 1988. On holiday from Poly, I had a temporary summer job as a parcel sorter on the night-shift at White Arrow in Blackburn - not quite the monotonous cycle that Bill Murray found himself in. But then again, he didn't have to work with a set of Bastard fans. After the final shift of the week had ended at 6am on the Saturday morning, an immediate port of call was always my Dad's newsagents on Livesey Branch Road, just a stone's throw from Ewood Park - I know, I tried it. There I would help get the papers sorted for the cheeky little Rovers-supporting shites who delivered them. When Don MacKay's team had reached Wembley and won the Full Members Cup in 1987, we had been mercilessly goaded, what with Burnley's narrow escape from relegation to the Conference. Fortunately, our Wembley appearance the following year was far more spectacular and as well as earning Burnley a crucial shedload of money, served to shut the little shysters up for a while, (a service which, for the next few years, was provided by the Bastards' endearing habit of dramatically bottling out in the play-offs).

My Dad first took me to the Turf on 9th October 1976 (vs. Orient, 3-3), and it was only when the Orient visited us on the 9th May, 1987 that I went to the Turf alone. He couldn't bear the thought of seeing the Clarets perish, and so stayed at home and listened to the radio - which must have been more tense than being there. A lifelong Claret, Dad had watched sadly as the club had declined through the late-70's and mid-80's. Unlike me, he grew up equating Burnley with the First Division and with success, and he had squeezed into Maine Road with my Grandad and Uncle and with 65,000 others on that May evening in 1960 to see the (still-developing) team of Connelly, McIlroy et.al. defeat Manchester City 2-1 and overtake Stan Cullis' famous Wolves team to win the League Championship for Burnley.

The idea of Burnley as League Champions and in the last eight of the European Cup seems wholly incongruous to my generation of Clarets. We've only ever known a Third and Fourth Division outfit, with occasional and very brief excursions to the dizzy heights of the old Second Division. While studying for my Politics BA, I was introduced to an extreme form of empiricism, by which any historical fact put forward by an individual was only valid if the individual concerned had witnessed the phenomenon first-hand, i.e. you had to be there yourself to be absolutely sure it happened. I asked if this meant that I could no longer state as fact Burnley's League Championship triumph of 1960. Well, no, I apparently couldn't. What about photographic and TV evidence, and the accounts of the 65,000 witnesses? Not relevent, replied the Prof. It could all have been an elaborate hoax. Given that, at the time, Burnley were languishing in 17th place in the Fourth Division and had just been tonked 3-0 at Hartlepool, I did begin to wonder.

Like many others, I now regret that Dad and me gradually drifted away from the Turf. Although we could claim mitigating circumstances, in effect we abandoned the club we professed to love. Along with most of the town, we were accessories to the slow starvation of a 99-yr old living thing. To try and explain why, I can be certain that that it wasn't the declining standard of play. We regularly cheered on the local amateurs Accrington Stanley. It was more to do with the atmosphere around the place. It was no longer the Burnley we knew and had been devoted to. Under the management of Harry Potts, Brian Miller and Frank Casper, there was still the sense that Clarets were in charge of the Clarets. The club continued to introduce youngsters who had been carefully brought up through the ranks in the best Burnley traditions. The club remained an intrinsic part of the community, and vice versa. Bond and his cronies destroyed this century old link in a matter of months. We continued to watch eleven men in Claret and Blue every week, but most of them weren't Clarets. They were professional journeymen - footballing nomads whose commitment went no further than going through the motions for 90 minutes on a Saturday afternoon in order to pick up the following week's inflated wage packet.

One problem with getting out of the habit of watching football on a regular basis is that it's not always the easiest thing to get yourself back into. Despite modest improvements to the squad and the return of a true Claret, Brian Miller, to run the team, Burnley still couldn't make a serious and sustained impression on the Fourth Division promotion race, and when I asked my Dad that sunny September morning, not even the optimism of a new season (including an opening day league win, only the second since 1974) could tempt him to Halifax with me. Since starting the degree at Portsmouth, our time together had been very limited, and it was disappointing that he had decided not to bother with the short journey to West Yorks., but the morning had been spent with the old fella, and that was the next best thing.

After a visit to the Turf for my ticket, I called in at my Grandparents' house for a bite to eat. One of the ingredients of a deprived childhood must be the lack of a footy-mad Grandad who often took you to matches and the rest of the time sat in his armchair in shirt sleeves, with a cup of strong tea and a fag, and inbetween marathon revving coughs regaled you with a seemingly inexhaustible supply of football stories. Innumerable times I sat there as a nipper, my imagination fired by his first-hand accounts of one of the great eras of East Lancashire professional football - Burnley's misfortunes in the 1947 and 1962 Cup Finals (Kippax stupidly playing against Charlton with the flu), the famous F.A.Cup quarter-final which saw Burnley lose a 3-0 lead over Blackburn in the last 15 minutes of the game, Harry Leyland, the eccentric Blackburn goalkeeper playing the game of his life in the following semi-final to get Rovers to Wembley (only to get well and truly stuffed by the Wolves team whom Burnley had pipped to the League title only days before). The great Accrington Stanley team of the mid-1950's, who succumbed late on to the brilliance of Liddell after dominating Liverpool at Anfield in an FA Cup tie, and who came agonisingly close to promotion to the Second Division on more than one occasion. The instinct of Brian Clough, the pace and trickery of John 'Handbag' Connelly, the sheer class of Jimmy McIlroy.

We were regular visitors to the non-league grounds of the area, taking in all the great characters of the day - mainly at Great Harwood, then in the Northern Premier League, and Accrington Stanley, on the rise again but still only in the Lancashire Combination. They once drew each other in some cup competition, and a bumper crowd turned up at Harwood to see the speed and strikepower of the legendary Dave 'Haggis' Hargreaves pitted against the thuggish brilliance of a nutter called John Wood in the Harwood goal; and conversely, the aerial dominance of Harwood's towering centre-forward Furnival versus the agile but tiny Mick Finn in the Stanley goal. After a furious 1-1 draw at the Showground, Stanley finished the job back at their place in the replay, 2-0.

Haggis really was a legend in Accrington. Strong, without being bulky, his wild hair, 'tache and headband could have landed him a part in 'One Million Years BC', no problem. Season after season he ploughed his way through the mudheaps of the Lancashire Combination and the Cheshire Leagues in the all red of the Stanley, yards faster than any of his opponents. One season, Stanley finished runners-up in the Cheshire League Second Division but were ridiculously denied promotion because of the standard of their ground. Undeterred, they set about improving the ground and the team promptly went one better and won the League the following season. Towards the end of that season, Stanley played Oldham Town at home, with a gale-force wind blowing down the pitch. Stanley had the wind behind them as they kicked off the second-half, and on receiving the obligatory tap back, Haggis lashed the ball over the flailing Oldham keeper directly into the goal, fully 60 yards away. Nayim? Beckham? Nothing that Haggis couldn't do. Someone told me he was in the Guinness Book of Records. I don't know if that's true, but his goal a game ratio certainly earned him a paragraph in the Rothmans Yearbook - he played nearly 300 games for Stanley.

On 27th May, 1994, Burnley's Les Thompson played his last professional game of football, winning promotion at Wembley in the Second Division play-off final. Four months later, he was struggling to hold his place in Stanley's midfield. But he wasn't the first to go down this road. Mick Finn, all 5ft 5ins of him, only played for Burnley four times, but all in the First Division, against Everton in front of 45,000 at Goodison, Tottenham, Chelsea at Stamford Bridge and (ahem) Carlisle. A few seasons later, Mick was between the sticks for Accrington, a position he held with distinction for many seasons.

My Grandad also took me to some of my earliest games: Blackburn vs Chelsea in the mud at Ewood. I was right at the front along one of the wings and can still vividly remember Dave Wagstaffe tearing past me down the left, cutting inside and putting so much power behind a blistering shot that he spun round and fell over - Peter Bonnetti in goal, bare-handed, beating away the shot with mud splattering his face as the ball audibly smacked against his hands; Blackburn vs Burnley at Ewood, an absolute cracker with the Clarets coming from two down to make a draw in front of over 22,000 fans, Peter Noble starting the comeback with an extraordinary dipping volley from way out; Burnley vs Sheffield Utd at the Turf: with Burnley in desperate need of points at the bottom of the table, I remember the Longside erupting with delight when Malcolm Smith netted the only goal of the game, a win which was to see Burnley embark on an impressive run, winning six and drawing three of their last twelve games to avoid a second successive relegation. So perhaps you can begin to understand why no memorable football-related day could be complete without this fine old man who contributed so much to my childhood. I only wish I could still listen to those stories, but barely two months later the Woodbines had taken their final, deadly toll.

The drive to Halifax is definitely one of the better ones if you approach from the West along the single carriageway through the beautiful pastures of Cliviger and into the winding route through Cornholme towards Todmorden, where the roadside valleys are so steep and rise to such an altitude that, come the snowy season, you wouldn't be surprised to see Alberto Tomba up there training for Val D'Isere, zig zagging inbetween the sheep. The journey that day was slow, the road busy with the cars and coaches of the travelling Claret hordes. It looked for a while that I would miss the kick-off, especially as I could find nowhere to park when I reached the Shay. I ended up parking by some garages underneath a railway viaduct. One of my Portsmouth Poly FC First XI team-mates (and Halifax fan) Woody, later told me that I'd parked in one of the dodgiest areas going, and was lucky to find not even a wheelnut missing when I returned. (This reminds me of that moment on the radio when Bernard Manning, a Man City fan, was asked what he thought about Liverpool: "Liverpool? Aye, I go there once a year to visit me hubcaps.")

The staff at the Burnley ticket office had told me there were no terrace tickets left. Despite this, I ended up on the terracing (where I wanted to go anyway) though I'd had to shell out �7 for a stand ticket. Halifax was one of those places that had to give their home end up to the Burnley fans in order to safely accommodate us all, consigning the Shay faithful to the remaining three quarters of the ground. This consisted of an unoccupied Wigan-esque grass bank behind the goal to our left, a cess pit/speedway track remains around the goal to our right, and a modest wooden construction flanked by small banks of terracing along the opposite side. Although the Shay was one of the more spacious Fourth Division grounds, we took great delight, as always, in pointing out the relatively palatial surroundings of Turf Moor and the recent renewal of large-scale support with a medley of short and to-the-point numbers - "---- ground, no fans", "What's it like to see a crowd", "You're supposed to be at home" and upon the pathetic response from the couple of hundred in the shed opposite, "It's nice to know you're here (so ---- off home)". Unfortunately, our numerical superiority at many away grounds often became merely a source of consolation once the game got underway.

One lesson soon learned by visting Fourth Division grounds is to come prepared, i.e. food and drink. Cases of malnutrition were reported in Burnley late one Saturday night as 2,000 Clarets returned from the North East having eaten all the pies at Darlington by about twenty to three. Hence, I had a can and butties at the ready. Although rare, you can sometimes discover refreshing exceptions to this rule, like the absolutely delicious coffee at Rochdale, so tasty that rumour has it that the Gold Blend couple have been sighted partaking of the cafe au lait on the Spotland terraces.

One of the legacies of the Taylor Report is the increasing dearth of grounds like the Shay. OK, not classic architecture by any means, but the place had real character. Like your average terraced house, it had bits added on here and there, had been patched up in places, but was undeniably homely. How many could say that about the new breeze block, DIY-store stadiums like Chester or Walsall? The larger of the new stadia as well - Millwall or Middlesborough, for example - have about as much warmth and welcome as a wet Monday night in Bacup. And I'm not just being a rose-tinted nostalgic here. Three days after the Halifax game, I was standing under a leaking roof on a wet Tuesday night at Rochdale (not much better than its Monday counterpart in Bacup) having paid for covered terrace which I naively assumed would protect me from the rain. I'm not against decent facilities, but football grounds designed from scratch on a TD board in some glass and concrete, air-conditioned city office completely and utterly lack the sense of organic development which provides character and nurtures a tradition, without which football clubs as we know them cannot ultimately survive.

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