“I’ll have enough trouble sorting out my own family,” says Alex Wood, Burnley’s safety officer. “Three of my four sons support Blackburn, one’s Burnley, and my wife and I are both Burnley.” The rarity of local derbies — only four in 25 years — has merely heightened the sense of battle.
Down the road, Paul Agnew, head of PR at Ewood Park, has been a Blackburn fan for 41 years. “It’s not hatred, us and Burnley, it’s about bragging rights.” But he still manages to slip in the result of their last league meeting, 5-0 in 2001.
No Burnley fan, meanwhile, will ever forgive the message trailed from an aircraft over Turf Moor as the Clarets headed for elimination by Torquay in the 1991 playoffs. “Staying Down 4 Ever Luv Rovers, Ha Ha Ha,” it read. After Blackburn’s humbling by a team of Norwegian part-timers in the Uefa Cup in 1994-95, the hottest seller in Burnley was a bobble hat with “Burnley” on one side and “Trelleborg” on the other.
Blackburn gained a leg-up into the elite on the back of Jack Walker’s millions, but Burnley’s claim to footballing superiority is more than just bluster. With a conurbation of just 80,000 and a regular attendance of 12,000 at Turf Moor, Burnley claim the highest support per head of population of any club in the League. The merest flicker of success will ensure a capacity crowd of 21,000 at the ground.
Burnley’s stock-in-trade has always been ball-playing inside-forwards, often balding, mostly homegrown and always sold on to keep the club afloat. The latest of them, Richard Chaplow, left last week, bound for West Bromwich Albion. As their leading striker, Robbie Blake, also departed to the Midlands in the transfer window, Burnley fans are understandably concerned about their team’s scoring potential this afternoon against a Blackburn side that has already been moulded in the muscular image of Mark Hughes, their new manager.
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Burnley manager Steve Cotterill’s indoctrination in the unique belligerence of an east Lancashire derby occurred last Sunday, when he went to buy the papers from his local shop on an estate near Blackburn’s training ground at Brockhall.
“There’s a little tin footballer at the entrance and someone had dressed it in a Burnley shirt,” he says. “Five minutes later, I came back and the shirt had been cut up and was hanging in the trees. I had to laugh.”
But defeat will be no laughing matter for either of these proud footballing towns this afternoon.