In 1980-81 you were leading reserve-team goalscorer, but released at the end of the season - tell us about that

Yes, they released me at the end of the season. I was on the bench for the Charlton and Carlisle game, and, I think, for the Oxford game at the end of the season. It comes like a bolt out the blue really. You're contract is up as a professional and you renegotiate terms at the end of that season which you felt as though you'd done enough to do, obviously with the scoring record that you'd had in the reserves and you'd made progress into the first team. The grooming system which was at Burnley at that time would have been that, "Well, he's doing well from October to March, let's chuck him in, give him three or four games or at least get a feel of the first team situation," and then from there you do the same at the pre-season. So when you come back for the 1982 season, you're blooded again. And maybe you'd have been thrown in to something like the Manx Cup to see how you fare, give you a run of about half a dozen games, and if they thought then that you were going to be OK, then they'd extend your contract by another two seasons.

My own thoughts were that at the end of that season, with them having been relegated, the difficulty that the club had at that time was finance. They had to get rid of a few of the older ones - Billy Rodaway, Jim Thompson, myself, Dean Walker, Geoff Smith - there were about six who were released at the end of that season.

I would have been 20, just coming up 21. I think what happened was that there was a change of personnel within the club whereby the club historically had had connections with the North-East, Scotland, Ireland, Wales. The scouting system was changed dramatically around that time, around 1980. And the last intake would have been 1979, from Newcastle, Scotland and Wales.

That's right. They were probably among the last batch of youngsters who were likely to come through the ranks - the Mike Phelan's, the Trevor Steven's - who were also the youth team players. But there few from the North East because the scouting system had fallen apart there.

Well, I think they brought in a Chief Scout called Gordon Clayton at the time, who'd been around a bit, predominantly in this area, and done a bit for Man Utd, and I think it was at his instigation - perhaps, I don't really know - but it was his instigation that broke it off.

Newcastle. He went to Newcastle. He cut off the supply from the whole of the North East. I don't know the ins and outs of it, but there was obviously something amiss, because the kids stopped coming down at 14 years old from the North East, so there was something not right. The kids stopped coming from Wales, the kids stopped coming from Ireland, and they were basically looking for kids from the Wirral, Merseyside and were more concentrated on the North West.

Yes - they closed their youth policy, basically!

Where you look at the programmes from that side: Alan Stevenson, Peter Noble, Jim Thompson, Rodaway, Cochrane on the left, Billy Ingham, Fletcher, Kindon - were all reaching the end of their careers, they were all early 30's and beyond. The year in which they were actually relegated was the year in which Brian Miller had no option but to throw Vince Overson in, Kevin Young, Andy Wharton, Brian Laws. He had no option at all other than to bring these people in, or spend. The reserve team was good enough to actually - had he done it earlier or realised it earlier because it was Christmas before they did anything about it - had they realised this earlier then they might not have gone down. They could have held their own and rebuilt again with the batches coming in beyond.

Yes, if they could have avoided relegation. But it then put such a strain on the club's finances at that time that perhaps they thought, "Well, we've got all these young kids, we'd like to keep them all, but we need some sort of experience there to carry them through." The only handful of people who were left there from the old school were Derek Scott, Alan Stevenson and Martin Dobson. The rest had all dispersed really. It was a completely new team by 1982.

Yes, when they brought in the likes of Steve Taylor, and they were bringing people in from the free transfer markets. Whereas they'd normally grown their own and sold one on before bringing in another, at that time they didn't have anyone in that category.

You're marginally unaffected from below the first team, because as the system is set up, the youth team train on their own, the reserve team train on their own and the first team train on their own. And there's three separate dressing rooms as well. So the crack and the camaraderie of the dressing room, as such, still remained with the youth and reserve teams - they were still buoyant, they were still doing well. They were itching to get into the next dressing room up, because they were doing well and they could maybe see the writing on the wall, but there's not a lot you can do about it because it's management that's got to decide when somebody's passed his sell-by date and they'll move someone up from the lower ranks.

I think it was a case of apathy creeping into training, where the reserves would go and slaughter the first team in training matches. You got the impression that...well, is their heart really in it anymore? They're really low and there's no-one there to build them up or maybe they need to do something to change all this, because the reserves just then beat them four or five nil, come off the training session, went in, got a bath and went home, and hope and wait and pray that a call would come for them Friday morning for the first team. But you've absolutely no - although you feel for the club - you're powerless to do anything about it as a player.

I think maybe that's where the first difficulty set in, when Brian took over, because maybe a lot of the players had been around a lot of the time with Brian anyway as a coach, even as a player, as somebody that had been at the club for many years anyway, and maybe there was some form of resentment in the first team at that time from the older people. Because maybe they didn't want that change, and they couldn't adapt to Brian being the manager rather than coach. It might have been better had somebody come back who stood off from the players, who wasn't as close to the players as perhaps Brian had been over 20 years.

When Harry was there, Harry used to be there in presence only, until match days came. Brian used to coach, Frank used to coach, Ray Pointer used to coach. There were enough coaching staff there to keep the day to day running of everything, but you'd need that figurehead separate from the players on a one-to-one basis who really just comes in, picks the team, gets on with the transfer dealings, the contracts, that side of things. Brian, I don't think, was geared up for that change, and still turned up at training to be one of the lads still, and maybe it was that. But you couldn't command the same sort of respect from players who were maybe only seven or eight years younger than him at the time.

Harry had been around since the 1940's, and had been through everything with the club; had gone away, had come back, had been a scout and done everything. To have him as the figurehead was probably as presence only that he was the manager. But the training and coaching staff used to do everything without Harry really having to get involved in tactics and things like this - that was already prepared for him by match days. He did keep the club on a level with the systems in place, but commanded enough respect that you needed to give the manager, as that he had been round the mill once already. And the older players could appreciate what he had done before as well, a bit like Adamson, really. He commanded that level of respect - that he ran that club, what he said went, really. You know, you didn't jump out of place: you cleaned the boots, you swept the terraces, etc, and it was the old school carried on.

Brian did the same, but I just felt that they were maybe just a bit too close, because he'd coached this team, and it was a big step for him. It was the obvious step for the club to take - to promote from within and to move Frank up to first-team coach. But when Brian stepped up, Frank took control of players he'd actually been playing with! And it wasn't until the likes of Kevin Young, Phil Caverner, Vince Overson, myself, Andy Wharton came through the ranks along with the new people at the club - Billy Hamilton, Steve Taylor - that Brian commanded the same level of respect that Harry had.

I think that the reserve team players didn't feel as though they needed anybody there, because you've got to understand that from the age of, say, 15, there was a youth team developing within Burnley - well, when I was 15 - there was a handful of apprentice pro's there - Stuart Robertson, Neil McGregor, Stuart Pickerill, Billy O'Rourke, Phil Caverner. There was only about half a dozen of core apprentices. The reserves had the likes of Tony Arins, Tony Norman, Richie Overson, Rob Higgins - they'd gone through a phase where they'd had a lot of professionals.

By the time this youth team, which was flourishing round about 1977 - we got to the semi-final of the Youth Cup against Aston Villa - there was a bunch of kids, about six of them, around 16-17 years old at Burnley in their first year as apprentices, and there were the likes of myself and Brian Laws who were still at school, coming in to play against Manchester City, Liverpool, Middlesborough and Aston Villa. They'd never had any of this youth team spirit since Dave Thomas' day and Leighton James. It was the best youth team they'd had since 1969, and they had all been apprentice pro's. We'd been brought up from the age of 15-16 so that when I came as an apprentice you were an automatic choice for the A team. The A team won their league and the Lancashire Cup that year. It was the year after they cleared out the Marshall Burke's and the Rob Higgins' - they had been there from 16 to nearly 21 years old without ever really breaking into that first team. And once they'd gone, it left a huge void then, and I think where it fell down was that we knew we could be promoted to that first team and hold our own, because we'd had nearly three years together. You might get Jim Thompson or Billy Rodaway coming in as an experienced pro just to balance the team, but the rest of it was just young lads at 17-18 years old.

I certainly felt that the trend had come whereby you'd stay at Burnley till you were 21. So 16-18 you'd be an apprentice, at 18 if they felt you would make the grade or were going to be any good for them, you'd get two or three years as a professional, to learn your trade even further. By the age of 21, had you not got International honours as Under-21's or whatever - had you not made that level and broken into the first team or had at least a dozen, half a dozen league games, you were on your way. With the turmoil that the club had gone through, with relegation, they couldn't afford, I don't think, to keep you on. Bringing youngsters in at the bottom end, promoting youngsters within, couldn't be done to get them out of that situation quick enough.

I don't think so, but having said that, I felt that it should have been continued. Had I been there at 21, I would have been a better player. You feel that now, even looking back you feel that. I got a raw deal, and you feel awful. You come away from home as a 16 year old lad, all I wanted to do was play for Burnley Football Club. I wasn't bothered about playing for anybody else. It was such a comedown to play for anybody else.

Yes, definitely. You'd been groomed in a style. You were accustomed to playing football, good football on the floor. And the players that have gone through - the likes of Brian Laws and Vince Overson - have all been established and all made the grade at various levels; Trevor Steven and Michael Phelan were the last batch - along with David Miller - they were the only three realistically that had a chance. If you got three out of ten, you've done really well. The problem they had when we were there was that they probably had about seven out of ten that could all come through. Now, collectively, if they'd kept them together and strengthened the first team squad for the period of time where they got the promotion - because they got the promotion and went straight back down. And that was really where they didn't have the depth within the squad. Had they kept what they had, they would have had at least four quality players all capable of dropping into that first team, all home-grown players that could hold their own.

No. But then again, the first time I came as an apprentice to Burnley, in the same first season, Peter Beardsley came. So, again, within a week of watching Peter Beardsley train with the reserves but not actually play, you think, you know, are they looking at him properly or not? I played with Peter Beardsley since I was a kid at Wallsend, most of us had - most of the young lads who were at Burnley had played with Peter Beardsley. But Peter was very diminuitive. He had all the skill in the world, but he maybe didn't develop until around 18 or 19 years old and fulfil what his potential was. And you do get that with players. Some players are absolutely brilliant at 14 or 15, but by the time they're 18 are past their best.

I never got that impression from the club. The club was always First Division orientated - the set-up and the systems that were in place. The biggest change was the fact that you stopped seeing the young players coming into the club, probably as a result of resources. But after I'd gone, you still take an interest. The first result I'd look for would be Burnley. You didn't want to see the club doing badly, you still lived in the town. And you could see this transitional period coming with the events of Bob Lord's death, and John Jackson taking over. And suddenly you've got this outsider coming into the place, and looking from afar you're thinking, "What the hell's going on there?" And then they give away Brian Laws for �50,000 and Mike Phelan for �50,000.

After being relegated from the Second Division, it was such a body blow to the club in general, but there was still the ability there to bounce back, and when they did bounce back in 1982 it was then that they really needed to rebuild from the damage that had been done the previous two years. And I think that's where it fell down. Because you had a good young team with a nucleus of home-grown players on which to rebuild. But that's when it all went haywire then.

I think it could have been continued, personally. It was the decisions taken within the club that affected what you've got now, because its only the past two or three years that they've got the club on a solid footing again. They're trying to trace back their steps to the successful days, and I think they'll find that there was no reason why the success couldn't have carried on through the eighties, because it carried on elsewhere. The opportunities that Burnley missed out on was in actual fact down to just that one part of isolating the scouting system that they'd built up over a twenty year period. It was wiped away in the stroke of a pen. We never got to know what the ins and outs were, but instead of Paul Gascoigne and Chris Waddle coming to Burnley, there were going to Newcastle. The kids in the North East at that time were staying put, or they were going to clubs other than Burnley. Whereas, once you'd been to Burnley and you'd seen the set-up - 64 acres of training ground, a First Division stadium, the club being run correctly and you were treated right. A lot of that disappeared overnight, and subsequently you've got to ask yourself, well, if I'm a budding 15 or 16 year old England Schoolboy, why should I go to Burnley? You'd want to go somewhere where the priority was bringing the youth through the ranks.

Exactly. It wasn't a major draw on resources. I think there was a rift between the network that was set up and the new guy that came in. That's my own personal opinion, but I think that's what it was - somebody's upset somebody by just cutting them off. But there was never a kid came from Scotland, Ireland, the North East for years. The chief scout at Burnley used to be Harry Potts, and before that the network was still set up. A lad called Sandy was the scout for Scotland and there was Pete Kirtly and Ken Walshaw in the North East. They used to do it combined. Ken used to go to all the lads' houses, Pete used to coach Wallsend Boys Club.

Me and Brian Laws used to get in a minibus on a Saturday morning at eight in the morning and be brought to Burnley to play for the youth team at eleven. Rather than play for the school we'd come down. If there was a home game we'd watch the first team, have a meal, hang around for a bit and go home. But you were looked after, though, and you enjoyed it. You'd be back home at half past seven. But once that had gone, it's very hard to recapture. Because at that time, clubs like Liverpool, Notts Forest and Coventry were switching on to it and bringing youngsters on.

But even at that time, there was probably only Terry Venables at QPR and Crystal Palace who was really focusing on the youth set up and bringing youngsters through like Clive Allen, Vince Hilaire. But he was probably taking the cream of what was down South, whereas Burnley used to take the cream of what was in the North.

It was all arranged on a personal, individual basis. As contracts came to an end, you negotiated with management as to what you felt was right and fit. The problem you have at being, say, in a first team at 16-17 years old, like Vince Overson, is that as an apprentice professional you're on �15 a week with your board and lodgings paid for. You pay no tax, so it was �15 spending money. You played for the youth team or the reserve team.

When you approached your 18th birthday, unless you're in that first team, the management would come along and say, "Well look, Vince has played seven or eight games, he's becoming an established player now. We've really got to alter his contract and turn him professional." And at that time they would have negotiated privately with him at what terms were set for many a first year pro. He may have got more because he was an established first team player by then.

But he would have been on a different structure to maybe me, coming in and sitting in front of Brian Miller as an 18 year old player and saying, "Well Brian, are you going to keep me on as a pro or not?" "Yes I am, and there's your contract. Take it or leave it." It wasn't the case that you had any support at that time to say, "Well look Brian, I've played six games for your first team, I think I deserve a bit more than that." Somebody coming up for the first time for their first contract is just glad to be taken on as a pro, and whatever's on the table you take. And at that time, my first professional contract was �75 a week as a basic first year pro. But out of that you have to be taxed and you have to pay your own board and lodgings. So you weren't that much better off, really. You only had about �30 left after tax and board.

Once you made the first team squad - if you sat on the bench, your wage automatically jumped to �95. It might have been different for others, but personally speaking, my wage went to �95 just for sitting on that bench.

�100. A �100 bonus.

Yes. And they used to pay bonus every four games, if I remember rightly. It was �50 a draw, �100 for a win.

To put it into some sort of monetary perspective, if Burnley at that time had a �100 a win, you've got to bear in mind that the likes of Aston Villa - because Tony Morley had left Burnley to go to Villa - they were on �500 a win. So there was a vast difference between where Burnley were at that period in time - and had been for some considerable time - and the likes of a big city club like Villa.

More than likely, yes, more than likely.

It was the case that you always felt comfortable, you always felt that you were going to be playing football, it was always enjoyable, it was very much a family club. Everybody knew everybody, and everybody knew you in the town and you felt as though you knew everybody in the town. You'd go to Manchester and the monetary rewards would probably have been that much greater, but at the end of the day, would you actually have been playing?

But I think this is only the case until you get to a certain bracket. It would have been the case that - you've only got to look at how many players come back. Burnley had to survive that way, really. And had you been Trevor Steven coming up to the point whereby it was time for a move, then it ought to have been a bigger move, from Burnley's point of view, than what it was. I mean, 350k for a world class player like Trevor Steven - a gift! The same goes for Mike Phelan as well. What Burnley should have been doing was grooming the likes of Phil Caverner and Kevin Young to go the same route.

Well, he was another casualty of that John Bond era. Looking back, in a way, I was glad I wasn't there. That was such a major traumatic period for players within that club who had been there, who were established, and this guy's come in and said "You're no bloody good, get out."

The impression that I got, speaking to players who were still my friends - Brian Laws, Mike Phelan - they were basically told, "You've got this club where it is today and, you know, we don't want you here." And the next thing you know, Laws is on the list and off to Huddersfield, I think, for 40 grand or something like that, and the next thing you know he's playing in the League Cup Final for Notts Forest. And then you look at Bond and think, "Well hang on for a minute, you just sold one down the river." You do not turn into bad players after coming through those ranks, and Burnley should have been either to build on that squad to get them back to where they should have been, or alternatively should have sold off to keep the cogs turning. Unfortunately it didn't work out that way.

Not a great deal, only from what I heard speaking to ex-colleagues - Vince, and one or two other players. You know, he basically broke the club up and the amount of fresh faces which were.....let's face it, if you're a 14 year old lad, all starry-eyed coming to Burnley, who were then a Second Division club, you could recognise the Martin Dobson's, the Leighton James' within that team, maybe a second spell, whatever. But you could recognise experienced players that you could look up to - that club was a family club. And you were treated the same, whether you were Martin Dobson, or whether you were Mick Wardrobe, 14 year old schoolboy - regardless of who you were.

The impression I got, looking in the club from the outside, was that when this guy came, he basically was a big time wheeler-dealer, you know, jetting off on Concorde to Miami, pulling up in a Merc - nobody had a bloody Merc in Burnley! He was filling up petrol for him and his wife and God knows who else, and these sort of stories came out. But he basically brought in all his mates! And that was the problem. If I'd have been there at 22-24 years old, I would have still felt honoured to pull on that claret and blue shirt. The problem created with Bond's regime was that nobody felt like that. All these guys had been around here there and everywhere with this bloke, and they'd done their time with Norwich and they'd done their time at Bournemouth and Manchester City - the Gerry Gow's, the Steve Daley's - and they might have been nice enough blokes, but they were out to grass at that stage, and picking up �1,000 a week. Joe Gallagher was picking up money at Burnley two years after he'd stopped playing there apparently. He was in contract, but he was crocked, he was injured was Joe, but that's not Joe's fault and it's not Gerry Gow's fault or any other person who was there at that period in time. It's the board of directors sanctioning the management decisions that took place in that period of time.

Well I think Jackson was probably on a bit of an ego-trip, along with Bond, really. Burnley have never been ones for limelight, they just got on with things. And when they won something, they shouted about it, much the same as the Liverpool board was. You know, if they got beat they said nowt, if they won they said nowt, but if they got to the end of the season and there was a pot on the shelf, then they'd jump to the high heavens, and it continued in that same mould. You very rarely got Shankly or his players spouting off on the back pages about something or other, they just did their job professionally. But these guys, Bond especially, seemed to be on the back pages or the telly every five minutes, and Jackson seemed to want to be part of that, I suppose. And the names in the club were elevated to create interest, but they weren't performing on the park.

I think it might have set off with that intention, but very quickly I think....to change something that had been set. They'd always continued that tradition within Burnley from the 50's - Jimmy Adamson, Harry Potts - they'd all been schooled and groomed in a way whereby they knew how that club ran. And it had run quite successfully until a point where resources were restricted, and it was maybe - like you say - a last ditch attempt to bring the club round, but too quickly.

You still need that conveyor belt, when all's said and done. If you have 34 year old players coming to the end of their careers, you've got to have 22 year olds ready willing and able to take his place; and below the 22 year olds, you've got to have 15-16 year old kids coming through. They're not all going to make it, but you've got to prune maybe two or three out constantly. All smaller clubs have to work that way, there's no other way of doing it, because they can't compete with the multi-million pound deals that go on now. The conveyor belt at Burnley stopped, and from then on they had - by the time Bond came along - there wasn't even a conveyor belt that had been running. By the time Burnley hit the Fourth Division, they were on their way to becoming a part-time club. And but for the odd influential players like your Ian Britton's, there wasn't the amount of quality that they'd had or they'd been used to to get them out of that trouble.

You see, there wasn't really a voice from the terraces. Even though we were in the Second Division, we'd still get the 12-13,000 crowds, which was good. As soon as you got a big game, it was up to nearly 20,000. But the players had an affiliation with the town and the club, and that's what made the difference - the fact that you'd play a reserve team game with 300 or so there and you'd hear every comment. And I don't care who the hell you are, you hear that comment when there's only 300 people in.

When there's a big crowd in - I can remember running out on my debut, I think it was Port Vale in the F.A. Cup, and I think there were around eight or nine thousand in - it's a buzz. You don't hear any comments, you don't hear Brian Miller shouting at you - its blanked out. You just hear a buzz, you never hear the fly comment that you get in the reserve game, you know, somebody at the back of the Bob Lord stand shouting, "Bloody hell Wardrobe, you're crap!" The problem was that by the time you got to the lower end of the Third and Fourth Divisions, the players are affected by the three or four thousand people in the ground - there's no buzz and you're hearing every single comment. Somebody shouting at Phil Malley really will take effect because he hears it, and the next time he gets the ball he won't have the confidence to do it right, and there was really only two or three within that team who could cope with that.

But I think it all boiled down to the fact that you've got to have, in depth through that club, people who wanted to play for that club. If somebody had turned round to me, as a 16 year old and said, "Here's a Newcastle shirt," I'd have took it. But it would have been a toss up between there and Burnley, because I had the same affiliation to Burnley after spending that short time there. When I left Burnley, I didn't really want to play for anybody else. The only other club I would have played for would have been somebody better. I certainly didn't want to play for anybody worse. In the end I went to Stockport, who at that time were effectively a part-time club, it was a bit of a shambles. And, with all respect to them, I just wasn't interested in playing for Stockport.

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