FAN’S VIEW: 24/25 – No.10: BURNLEY AT HOME

OXFORD UNITED 0 BURNLEY 0

The Clarets in my opinion are the best team that have ever visited the Kassam Stadium for a league game. Granted this was only our fourth game in tier two at our current home but I thought Burnley were a class above our previous three visitors.

I doubt there’s many better than them in the 24/25 Championship. Leeds? But Burnley won at Elland Road a fortnight ago. West Brom? Caveat – we’re only seven games in and a lot always happens during a season of the twisty-turny variety.

A victory in Oxfordshire would have put them top of the table.

Their keeper James Trafford cost £19m from Man City. This summer they paid £10.2m to Montpellier for Maxime Esteve. Josh Brownhill arrived from Bristol City nearly five years ago for a fee of £9m. They had to pay £11m to get Lyle Foster from Belgian club Westerlo in January 2023. Luca Koleosho who has only just turned 20 is now a £40m rated player. Burnley bought him from Espanyol in July 2023 for £2.6m.

Our opponents spent eight of the previous 10 seasons in the Premier League and having been relegated last season will have pocketed a tidy little parachute payment of £49m.

That’s what were up against.

Bloody hell, they were quick. I’ve said this about every team we’ve faced so far to some extent. It’s already been a no shit Sherlock observation that the Championship is quicker than L1 but watching live brings it home for real in a way TV coverage never can – and Burnley were that bit quicker still.

They had 70% possession. They never let Tyler Goodrham or Siriki Dembele do their stuff whilst looking wizards on the ball with their touch and technique. At times you could see why Koleosho is so highly thought of and there were others just about as impressive.

Yet – and here’s the thing, a very big thing – for all that they couldn’t beat us. They couldn’t score against us. We were absolutely magnificent defensively.

Yes Burnley had the superior and more expensive players and played the more attractive football but I challenge any neutral to disagree that we deserved a point for our defensive shape and the sheer effort we put in. We would have been slaughtered if we’d gone out with the attitude that if we attack this lot we can win. Des knows what’s what and how to approach each game accordingly, probably better than any manager we’ve had for decades. Or ever?

No two games of football are quite the same and some are very different. Seemed a sensible tactic to me, don’t get beaten and see if you can sneak a win given what each manager had at their disposal here.  

Burnley had 14 shots but we blocked five of them. Their one on target was magnificently saved by Jamie Cumming at the fence end. Eight were off target and there’s no getting away from it here, two or three of those were crap efforts that they should have put away. If they had done so I may well be writing a very different Fan’s View now. If they had gone in it would have been 2 or 3-0 wouldn’t it? But that was the only part of their game where I thought Burnley fell short – unlike some of their fans on social media and I’ll come on to that later.

The commentator on the extended highlights called this affair a frustrating afternoon for both teams with Oxford unable to create chances and Burnley unable to take theirs. An excellent summing up except that I didn’t feel frustrated and I’m pretty sure our camp won’t have been either.  

Our visitors scored nine goals in their first two league games but have only found the back of the net four times in their subsequent five matches. Before they beat themselves up too much after failing to register against us they should take a look at our defensive record at home. Played four, conceded one. Just think how dodgy our defence was not long back and that was at a level below. Now look at us.

Peter Kioso is getting better and better. Although we played quite narrow at times I don’t think he ever really got exposed. Des opted for a new centre-half pairing with Ben Nelson coming in for his debut alongside Elliott Moore thus freeing up Ciaron Brown to play at left back.

He needed Brown there to try and counter Koleosho and what a job he did. Brown is a better defender than Greg Leigh yet someone felt the need to text into Radio Oxford saying Leigh was unlucky to have been dropped. Take a step back and have a look at the big picture I’d say and whilst anyone is at it, trust Des. Perhaps one day I’ll disagree with something he does but that’s not happening at the moment. I also think saying someone has been dropped is almost totally outdated. Football is now a squad game. Managers pick teams for specific matches and will also bear in mind the upcoming schedule. Gone are the days before subs when a team would only use about twelve or thirteen players a season. A player would only lose their place if they were injured to such an extent that they couldn’t stand up, in prison or too pissed to play.

I can’t argue with the man of the match award being given to Brown. Very well earned and we had a number of candidates. Can’t fault anything Moore did either.

Nelson is very inexperienced at Championship level having started just twice and come on as sub three times for Leicester last season between December and early March. No player at his age, 20, is going to be the finished article. Early on he looked a bit nervous. A couple of loose touches meaning the ball was not sticking when it was played to him which was a bit of a worry given that claret jerseys were on to us so sharpish. Passes were going astray too (he wasn’t the only one guilty of that) but there were signs that he’s got something about him. He was willing and confident enough to bring the ball out of defence and he grew into the game.

I would have settled for a point beforehand. That’s the truth of it. But is it worth asking could we have won the game? Of course it is. There wasn’t much chance of it happening but it wasn’t without possibility. We were on the back foot for almost the entirety of the match. There were some occasions when it was a case of attack against defence with us having no outlet. But once or twice there was an outlet, an opportunity for a quick break. No guarantees of course that anything would have come of it but we never got to find out because those breaks never happened. Our passing out wasn’t good enough. Not quite accurate enough or not the right amount of pace on the pass. Once Dembele was so close to being set on his way down the left flank heading towards the East stand with lots of grass ahead of him and a lack of defenders to be beaten, but it wasn’t to be.

In the last 10 – 15 mins we gave it a bit more of a go without leaving ourselves vulnerable but again the quality wasn’t quite there from an attacking perspective. I recall one incident when we had players forward and were applying pressure. A yellow shirt was free on the edge of the penalty area begging for the ball to get a shot away. It should have been an easy pass to him but it was woefully underplayed and the ball never arrived. So no shot and therefore obviously no goal.

The closest we came was from a Goodrham shot after he had stolen the ball with Burnley trying to play out after they had blocked an Owen Dale cross. That shot was stopped by CJ Egan-Riley, for some reason with his knees instead of his feet. This was the only time the visitors’ defence got in a mess. The ball trickled towards goal but way too slowly to get over the line. CJ ended up on his arse but was able to swing his body around and knock the ball out for a corner with Trafford diving backwards to provide another barrier to ensure their goal remained intact.

Truth be told it would have been daylight robbery if we’d nicked it but these things do sometimes happen in football.

The player on the spot ready to pounce was of course Mark Harris. He departed with seven minutes to go giving us another glimpse of Dane Scarlett. The Tottenham loanee was berated by some in the crowd for not chasing down a back pass. I thought the chances of him getting there in time to cause a problem were about zero and was pretty sure he would be working to instruction. Keep the shape. Still didn’t seem like he was putting himself about much anyway though.

Kyle Edwards got another 20 minutes under his belt which can’t be a bad thing and Dale had the same only previously featuring in the league this season at Blackburn as an 82^nd minute sub.

No two people quite see a game of football in the same way and often it’s a case of “I think they were at a completely different game to me”. We all have our own bias and perspective based on who we support, the way we like to see the game played and what we think we know and understand about football along with our experiences over the years.

One report described the match as “dour.”  But it was some of the comments on one of the Burnley fan sites: “up the clarets”, that was completely at odds with my way of thinking. Here are a few of them.

“We never got out of first gear and created very little. With the acknowledgement that it’s still very early days and it’s effectively a pre-season it’s been a long while since we’ve been in the Championship and I go into games wondering if we will score. That was really bad.”

“Utter sh1te today. No firepower and no creativity in midfield. Nowhere near the required standard.”

“Too defensive and build up too slow. Oxford were very poor. We are 3rd to bottom on EG in this division. Says it all really.”

“So boring to watch. Side to side and backwards slowly, no pace to our play at all and we can’t create anything. The jury is still out on Parker but so far I can see why other fans warned us. So boring, one of the lowest in the league for expected goals”.

“I find this brand of pass, pass, pass for the sake of it as entertaining as Cotterball”. (NB: Steve Cotterill managed them from 2004-2007)

“We were shite today. We’re the Man City/Liverpool/Arsenal of this division. Let’s stop pretending Oxford are actually any good”.

To provide some balance there were also a fair few comments acknowledging our work rate, defensive display and the fact that we’d won our previous three home games.

All this did get me thinking though and I can’t get out of my mind an experiment a science teacher had us doing at school over 50 years ago. Us kids were asked to dip their hands in a bowl of water and say whether we thought it was hot or cold. It was the same bowl but some said hot and some cold. What had happened was this was actually the second bowl we’d plonked our hands in. First some had placed theirs in one containing icy cold water and the other in very hot water.

Having had eight league one seasons I’m looking at the Championship 24/25 through eyes that have been conditioned by that fare (and for the record I think L1 is of a very good standard for third tier football). Burnley have of course arrived at where they are today from the other direction and probably have some fans who think their rightful place is in the Premier League.

Now we move on to play another team that was in the Premier League last season. I wonder what the general attitude of Luton fans is. They only had one season at the top level and were in the Conference as recently as 2014.