FAN’S VIEW 23/24 – NO.24: BURTON AT HOME

OXFORD UNITED 3 BURTON ALBION 0

Before the game I said we’d win easily. The final score line said we did and anyone who witnessed the full 90 minutes will know we were vastly superior to a woeful Albion side, the worst opponents we’ve played in L1 so far this season.  Dino Maamria was sacked from his position as manager last weekend but there was no rejuvenation under interim boss Gary Mills who has stepped up from his first team coaching role.

With 80 minutes on the clock and with just a single goal lead though it didn’t feel like it was easy. We knew we were just one bit of slack play away from throwing points away.

However, unlike in the previous couple of games we weren’t at any time sloppy at the back. We were never caught out, we were never desperately chasing back and we never had a gaggle of defenders chasing the ball whilst ignoring the need to mark opponents. We were back to being “proper”. I think that was down to having Ciaron Brown partnering Elliott Moore at centre half and bringing in the experienced Joe Bennett at left back. Given that Bennett was without a club for six months until we took him on at the end of November he should be commended for his level of fitness. Obviously he knows the game and how to defend properly but he gave us something going forward too. At 33 years old he’s not going to be bombing up and down as if he were a spring chicken of a wing back but he did venture forward more often than I’d expected. Fin Stevens in the other full-back berth had a good game too.

A solid back line is the foundation on which a winning team is built and keeping a clean sheet even against a side who are pretty hopeless is still pleasing. Burton had one shot on target which will be down to that hopelessness and our defence being way too good for them. Their approach, if indeed they had one, was strange indeed. They set about time wasting from early on and even when they went behind didn’t bother to hurry up much. Having a number of balls around the pitch is intended to reduce the time before a throw in is taken but at times Burton turned this around by not going for the closest. Referee Martin Woods made no real effort to stop such practices nor bothered to show yellow cards for quite nasty late challenges. Jake Caprice’s persistent fouling of Josh Murphy should definitely have resulted in a card.

I thought Woods was poor but when your team wins 3-0 this tends to get over looked. After all that went on in the first half to only add one minute too was a head scratcher. The scoreboard initially showed +4. Presumably the operator was trying to tell him something.

I was surprised to find that the Brewers were in possession of the ball for as much as 42% of the time because they didn’t create anything nor ever came across as a team who could keep the ball.

What didn’t surprise me was our attacking stats. 28 shots in total, half of which were on target. 9 were blocked with many of them coming in a frantic few seconds in front of the East stand.

I’ll give Burton their due, they did everything possible to repel that assault and it has to be said that we only ever found the back of the net with goals of a very high calibre.

Truth be told we could have hit double figures but we got nowhere near because our finishing at times wasn’t up to scratch and our ex-keeper Max Crocombe had an outstanding game.

Whenever Burton come to town they bring so few fans there’s never any atmosphere of note. It can get so quiet one could be forgiven for thinking their hearing had suddenly failed. At one time the silence was penetrated with a “come on, this lot are rubbish” uttered from the North Stand which could be clearly heard in the SSU.

Based on Burton’s performance it is not surprising their fans don’t travel away to watch them.

Our support though I thought in terms of numbers was very good. Nearly 7300 home fans in attendance for a game that doesn’t set the pulse racing just before Christmas.

We started the game in encouraging fashion with the plan noticeably being to get the ball to the wide men, Murphy on the left and Stan Mills on the right. Chalk on the boots.

In the sixth minute Cameron Brannagan hit a 60 yard cross field ball from half way inside our half to Mills whose first touch sent Ruben Rodrigues away. He’d run free and his cross was an inviting one. It was Murphy on the end of it. An easy chance to put away? It appeared so but he headed over and added to the body of evidence that indicates our finishing is poor. On careful inspection, a left arm push from Caprice was likely the deciding factor. It was one of those where many will argue “not a lot in that” but it is foul play.

After ten minutes or so I started to feel that this was all well and good but impatiently wanted us to move the ball faster. More one and two touch and not give it away quite so easily.

Midway through the first half after five fairly quick passes in our own half we launched the same weaponry that had seen us go close earlier.  This time the ball from CB had a lower trajectory. Mills controlled with his first touch and moved it on to Rodrigues with his second. RR’s run this time was into the box not out wider. He pulled the ball back with his right foot and curled a powerful shot home with his left from the right hand corner of the six yard box. Defender Ryan Sweeney was well beaten as was Crocombe.

This oozed class. Rodrigues is the most natural finisher at the club. A pleasure to watch.

No second goal followed. Murphy came inside and fired one over into the car park. He had a good game but when it comes to efforts on goal RR he is not.

Towards the end of the first half Bennett rescued the ball after mis-controlling and got a cross in from the byline which Mills allowed to hit his shins and dribble wide. A finisher would have finished.

In the second half it was nearly all us taking the game to them. Brannagan smashed one from just outside the area on to the post.

That was soon followed by the mad scramble then Mark Harris headed wide. Again his work rate could not be faulted but again a blank.

Mills was seeing a lot of the ball and we had two decent penalty shouts but still a second goal hadn’t arrived as we passed the hour mark.

It wasn’t only our no.7 finding a lot of space down the right. Rodrigues did too and his pull back was met by Harris who put it straight at Crocombe. He will score again one day won’t he? His manager thinks “once he gets one, he’ll get more”.

With about a quarter of an hour to go Tyler Goodrham replaced Murphy but if the visitors thought they were going to get some respite down their right flank they were mistaken. Goodrham immediately set up Harris for another chance to score. The low shot was well kept out by Crocombe. One day it will happen, it will.

At long last the second goal arrived in the 82nd minute. It came after a patient bit of passing play from the boys in yellow. When the ball was played into the box Burton could not clear effectively. Rodrigues, under a challenge from Adedeji Oshilaja, brought the ball under his spell. He brought it down with the heel of his right foot and instantly scored with his left into the top corner. A split second of poetry in motion. Blink and you’d miss it.

Before Burton kicked off again off went Mills and on came James Henry. This was so good to see. When he last got injured I had been convinced we’d never see him playing for us in the League again. He was lively. He nearly scored twice.

Our third was a 30 yard wonder strike from Marcus McGuane. It was only fair that this went in because we were at least three goals better than them. That was MM’s first league goal for us. This was his 70^th start. He’s still only 24. I’m expecting his goals per game ratio to improve.

When we’ve won and I’m pleased with the way we’ve played I’m much more inclined to watch replays of the game and also stare at the latest league table.

After Des’s first win as our manager I ended up watching the whole thing back again on iFollow but with the Radio Derby commentary. Listening to the other camp can provide unexpected amusement. The commentator was Dave Fletcher assisted by Aaron Webster who played over 500 games for Burton from 1998-2013. He now has the “player care representative” role in their Academy.

Some of the banter is quite humorous but Fletcher comes over as a dinosaur. He wasn’t impressed with us going sideways and backwards at the back. That was all down to having been touched by Liam Manning. That’s how Manning’s teams always play. Webster put him right, explaining at 1-0 up we didn’t need to force the game. I started to think this “Fletch” character knew little about football or how to pronounce some of the players’ names. He admitted he didn’t know how to say Rodrigues so mostly it lacked the “ez” on the end but sometimes not. Our no.18 was Marcus McGann (as in the acting brothers).

He was unhappy with the shouty man from the local radio station. That would be you Jerome; I could at times hear you in the background of Radio Derby. Fletcher, who once referred to us as Cambridge, took great delight in announcing the updated L1 scores before Radio Oxford. He also managed to spill hot tea over his trousers and thought that there were “so many steps here, it is horrible”. I guess the Kassam is a massive ground when compared to the Pirelli.

Commentating isn’t easy. I challenge anyone to try it silently in their head whilst watching a game. That said there has to be a level of competence before anyone is let loose on the world with a microphone.

I also watched the 8 mins 40 secs extended highlights. (Yes I know, haven’t I got anything better to do? Of course I have but this is comedy gold).

I’ve no idea who the commentator is. For Rodrigues’s first goal “He’s swapped foots there”.  Feet dear boy, they’re feet. Nine times he said “you know”. As in “I think that’s come off a defender you know” and “I think it’s deflected, you know.”

At the start of the second half: “The substitute Mark Harris will be disappointed with that. He’ll know that was an opportunity for him to make a difference from the bench”. No he won’t.

And lastly “the game looks beyond Burton now”. A second later the whistle blew for full time.

Other than Pompey and Peterborough the results elsewhere were for a change kind to us. Barnsley dropping two points at home to Charlton. Bolton getting beaten at the Toughsheet by Brizzle. Derby, also on their own patch being unable to beat out of form Wycombe. The same applying to Stevenage drawing 1-1 with visitors Exeter.

We always say it but it is true it is a tight league. We’ll not play many, if any, teams as bad as Burton were. It will be a lot harder at Northampton next game but this should have set us up for it quite nicely.

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Colin Barson’s Burton Albion Financial Analysis

 Burton Albion are one of the smaller clubs in our division, if not the smallest, although that means different things to different people, and is often an emotive subject. That they have recently had a couple of seasons in the Championship, which considering where they’ve spent most of their life, is a testament to good management, on and off of the field.

Until 2009 Burton were a non-league team, but that year (notwithstanding the fu**ing up of parties by OUFC) they won the Conference and entered the Football League for the first time in their history. Only ten years previously they were playing regional football with an average home crowd of 865. The catalyst for their upward trajectory has been two-fold. Firstly the leadership of Ben Robinson, their Chairman and majority shareholder, and secondly their building of, and move into, the Pirelli Stadium in 2005.

Ben Robinson has been involved with Burton Albion since 1976 and has been Chairman since 1995. He’s a 77 year-old self-made man, who made his money in insurance, and he has an MBE for services to the town of Burton Upon Trent. He was born during the second world war to a local mother and an American serviceman father, a father who he never knew, due to him going back to the USA after the war. This seemed to instil a work ethic in Ben as he had a number of jobs from the age of 12, culminating in forming his own insurance company, which he still owns to this day. I’ve found a lot of people who have a “rags to riches” story can be hard work and are sometimes arrogant or full of their own self-importance. But I’d have to say I’ve always found Ben to be an absolute gentleman and a very good host. Burton is one of the friendlier Boardrooms in the league and there are often interesting people in there, who all seem to be there as friends of Ben.

Going off on a slight tangent, before we get to the numbers, but I remember one season when Jim Rosenthal was in the Burton Boardroom, and he brought along his former colleague Gary Newbon, the ex ITV football commentator and pundit. Back in the day Newbon was the face of football on Central ITV and one of the clubs he covered was Nottingham Forest, complete with Brian Clough in his pomp. Cloughy used to intimidate Newbon during interviews, and Newbon always appeared petrified by him. Older readers may remember some of this. When talking to Newbon I suggested to him that he must have dreaded those interviews with Clough. He replied that, on the contrary, Brian Clough had been very good to him, and was good for his career. He said that as a young reporter he had to interview Clough when he arrived as Second Division Forest’s manager. Clough sensed his nervousness and put him at ease, after telling him to get his hands out of his pockets (something that became a Clough trademark)! As Forest and Clough progressed to become Champions of England and Europe, Gary said that Clough would always call him first with a story or transfer news and insisted to the TV companies that he wanted to be interviewed only by Newbon. He would sometimes phone Newbon and merely tell him to be at a certain place, at a certain time, always saying “Don’t be bloody late young man” and Gary would end up with a scoop or an exclusive. He also said that off camera Clough was one of the kindest men he knew, but that he needed to maintain his on-screen image, something that Gary was happy to play his part in, as it helped propel him from junior reporter to ITV football anchor. It goes to show that things are not always as they seem in the media.

So, onto the numbers. I’ll start with attendances, and as you can see below, Burton had the lowest attendance last season of the 24 clubs in this season’s League One at only 3,445. Furthermore, it was 85^th of the 92 clubs in the top four division, with another seven clubs outside of the 92 having larger attendances than Burton. So, on that metric they fulfil the “small club” criteria, so it’s no surprise that they also had the lowest gate receipts in our league. In most areas of income and expenditure they are lower mid table, with the glaring exception of their commercial income, which, at over £2.8m is third highest in League One. This is where they make their stadium work for them, with constant conferences, dinners, and other events producing a very good income. It bodes well for us that a club in a much smaller town, in a much smaller stadium than ours will be, can use the facility to provide such a game changing income. Make no mistake, without that income, and that stadium, I’m pretty sure Burton Albion would not be a League One club, and maybe not an EFL club at all.

Talking of the stadium, the land was donated to the club by Pirelli (it was previously one of their factories) in exchange for the naming rights. It cost £7.2m to build and is completely paid for. It is an asset of the club and sits on their balance sheet. We may view it as rather basic, and at a capacity of under 7,000 it’s certainly small, but all of these things are relevant, and it has certainly been a game changer for Burton Albion considering where they have come from.

The club spent just over £5.1m on wages in the year, which places then 12^th of the 17 clubs who reported this information and have apparently increased their playing budget for the current season. They made a loss of £449,061 for the year, and usually make either a moderate loss or a moderate profit. In other words, they live within their means, while punching above their weight. I looked at the numbers for Burton’s two years in the Championship and they had a turnover of just under £14m, no mean feat for a club with an average attendance of 865 not many years earlier. They have a positive equity of just under £4.5m placing them 6^th of the 22 clubs who report this figure.

All in all, Burton are a well-run club, and quite a nice club too. A good example of what can be achieved with good, stable management, over a period of time and a consistent approach. A contrast to some of the wrong’uns we see at other clubs.