'Great tradition but you're crap' was the general message. It was magical purely by comparison with the ghastliness of years spent traipsing around uncovered away ends being patronised in programme notes. Visitors to my office sometimes seem perplexed to see prominent on the wall a picture of David Eyres and Gary Parkinson, not exactly Burnley's most famous names, but our scorers when we beat nine-man Stockport at Wembley in 1994 to win promotion to Division One (from which, incidentally, we dropped a year later). And I believe it's a passion reborn by the 'The Orient Game', when a whole community woke up to the significance of what it was they almost lost. Ask all the former players who've settled there and go back every week. There is a passion for the club that few can match. And go to parks and playgrounds in the town_if kids are wearing strips, they're Burnley strips, not Man U. We get bigger crowds per head of local population than any club in the country, possibly the world (Manchester United would need about 300,000 a game to get near us, or so we tell each other). Go to Burnley on match days, and you know there's a game on. Having survived, every Burnley fan is convinced that though it's now a quarter of a century since we left the top flight, one day we'll be back. Victory that day was as momentous in its way as those that had given us our two League championships and our 1914 FA Cup triumph. By the time I was 29, in 1987, we had to win 'The Orient Game' to stay in the League a spectacular fall. I followed them from the very top to the very bottom. The year I first saw them, aged five, we were two games away from winning the Double. When I was three, Burnley were League champions. Looking back, there's no point denying the disappointments outweigh the moments of magic. Indeed for 20 minutes in the second half I thought we might equalise, but then a second defensive error led to the second goal, the third came not long after and that was that. Yesterday's 3-0 defeat was by no means a humiliation. We suffered the same scoreline, and I the same humiliation, on the sole occasion I persuaded Tony Blair to watch Burnley, away at Hartlepool, the humiliation deepened by the sight of Peter Mandelson, 'well-known Hartlepool fan', boasting afterwards that 'we' beat 'you'.

A 4-1 thrashing and brutal mickey-taking all the way home. Like so many of my Burnley experiences, it ended in massive disappointment. As Burnley had already done the double over City (2-0 away, 2-1 at home) and already beaten Manchester United, Newcastle and Chelsea, and positively marmalised Leeds 5-1 (not to mention getting to the League Cup semi-final), these Leicester fans were ripe for recruitment. I was nearing my twelfth birthday in 1969 and my present was to take to the game friends I'd been trying to convert to the Burnley cause since moving to Leicester from Keighley a few months earlier.

The journey back from hell ebookbike