From Euro-star striker to groundsman, via assistant manager, Bellamy has mastered all the trades. The mid-morning sun was melting the first frost of the season and Turf Moor was looking a lush-green treat. "It'll be all right for Sunday," Arthur Bellamy said, surveying the sward from the tunnel behind the Cricket Field Stand goal. "It's a big match for us."

There have been bigger games, though, at the splendidly appointed home of Burnley Football Club, as Arthur Bellamy knows only too well. The groundsman who has been preparing Turf Moor for the visit of Scunthorpe United and Sky Television for a Second Division fixture this afternoon was on the turf in the No.8 claret and blue shirt the night Burnley played Eintracht Frankfurt in the quarter-final of the Inter-Cities Fairs Cup, as the Uefa Cup was known back in April of 1967.

"We had beaten Stuttgart, Lausanne and Napoli here," Bellamy reflected. "And when we drew the first leg 1-1 in Frankfurt we thought, 'Good chance of getting to the semi-finals here'. We lost 2-0. But those were great times for Burnley football club. We'd won the Championship in 1960, got to the F.A. Cup Final in 1962 and were one of the best teams in the 1960s." So where, to quote the hotel porter who found George Best in bed with Miss World, did it all go wrong?

Turf Moor long-timers would have pointed to the stand to our left for the answer. It was opened by Edward Heath as the Bob Lord Stand in 1974, in honour of the butcher and chairman who played a meaty role in putting Burnley on the football map. To the paying punters, however, it will always be known as the Martin Dobson Stand, in mournful memory of the midfielder whose �300,000 transfer to Everton financed the structure and started the dismantling of the team that Harry Potts, as manager, Jimmy Adamson, as coach, and the brilliant Burnley youth development system had built.

Bellamy, like most of his colleagues, was a product of the envied Turf Moor nursery. Signed from Consett Iron Works Juniors as a 15-year-old in 1958, he made his first-team debut in March 1963, scoring the final goal in a 5-2 win at Maine Road. Burnley finished third in the old First Division that season, behind Everton and Spurs, and were third again at the end of the 1965-66 campaign, behind Liverpool and Leeds. They were dubbed the "Team of the Seventies" but were twice relegated from the First Division in that decade, and between 1976 to 1985 slipped from the First to the Fourth. It is 23 years since Burnley were last in the top flight. Even we greying thirty-somethings are struggling to recall the last drops of the vintage Clarets.

Bellamy, a genial native of north-west Durham and as lithe as he was in his playing days, is 57 and a proud grandfather now. "If they hadn't built the stand they might not have sold Martin Dobson," he pondered. "But there would have come a time when they would have had to sell Martin Dobson and all the others. Dave Thomas, Ralph Coates. If you haven't got the money coming through the turnstiles like the big city clubs you've got to get it from somewhere else. Because of the finance, because of the money, they just couldn't compete with the big clubs, really.

But it's all right comparing the club now with what it was like in the old days. The time to compare it with now is the day we played Orient here in 1987. If we'd lost we would have gone out of the Football League. I can remember driving to the ground that day thinking, 'We've been League champions. We've been one of the best clubs in the country. If we lose we'll be playing in the Vauxhall Conference'. Defeat was just unthinkable."

But Burnley weren't defeated. They won 2-1, with Bellamy in the home dug-out as Brian Miller's managerial assistant. Apart from four years on the staff at Chesterfield at the end of his playing days, and another four running a milk round in Burnley, Bellamy has spent his working life as the ultimate jack of all trades at Turf Moor, both on and off the pitch. As a member of the playing staff he filled every position except that of goalkeeper. And as a member of the backroom staff he has been youth team coach, reserve team coach, assistant manager and, for the past nine years, groundsman.

"I haven't been good at any job really," he said, with no false modesty. "I've just been average at all of them. As a player I could do a reasonable job in a lot of positions but I wasn't really good enough for any of them. I wasn't consistent enough. I used to like to think I was a bit of a midfield maestro but sweeper was the position I was most comfortable in. Jimmy Adamson came up with the idea of playing me in that role in the Fairs Cup, long before the sweeper system caught on, and I think it suited my strengths. I was a decent short passer. I had decent feet. I could read situations. And I was reasonably mobile."

Judging by the spick and span state of Turf Moor - the turf and the surrounding stands - Bellamy is pretty tidy in his latter day sweeping role too. Having worked on the ground staff when he arrived as a teenager ("there were no apprenticeships in those days"), it is perhaps not too surprising. It was as a matter of fateful expediency, though, that his attention was turned towards tending the club's actual grass roots. "The groundsman who looked after the training ground had taken ill," he recalled. "And John Bond, the manager at the time, just turned to me and said, 'Could you jump on that tractor and roll the pitches?'"

Under the guiding hand of their present manager, Stan Ternent, another graduate of the Turf Moor academy, Burnley are on a roll on the pitches of the Second Division. Third in the table yesterday morning, they have lost just once in 20 League matches. "There's been a big improvement this season," Bellamy said. "Things are looking quite positive, quite good. If we go up into the First Division we'll have some big clubs coming here. Wolves, Manchester City, Birmingham City. Big clubs mean bigger gates, bigger revenue and bigger sponsorship. Hopefully, things are looking up for us."

The days when the sky was the limit for Burnley are long gone now. This afternoon at least, though, there will be a place in the Sky schedule for the reviving Clarets - and the immaculate home turf.

Back to Index page	Forward to next article

Hosted by www.Geocities.ws