The introduction of automatic promotion and relegation from the Football League is not one of the most discussed of English football’s many transformative developments in the late-80s/early-90s but it remodelled the lower-division landscape irreversibly.
Ushered in for the 1986-87 season, at a time of falling attendances everywhere, the reform was welcomed as offering ambitious non-league clubs a chance to crash a closed shop clogged up by teams routinely dismissed as deadwood but re-elected most years anyhow. It also promised an injection of extra tension to the season’s run-in – and, in its first season, how it delivered.
Yet the “deadwood” club in most peril come the season’s concluding Saturday in 1987 were not one of the perennial strugglers – Rochdale, Crewe, Halifax, Torquay – but Burnley. Proud Burnley, two-time League champions, European pioneers, top-flight members only 11 years previously – and it would fall to the winger Neil Grewcock to score one of the club’s most important goals.
How had it come to this? In truth the Clarets’ predicament had long been in the post. Relegation to the fourth tier two seasons previously, under a high-profile team built by John Bond, accelerated a long spiral of decline. Grewcock was one of Bond’s less heralded signings, arriving from Shepshed Charterhouse after three years at Leicester between 1978 and 1981, in which he made only eight first-team appearances, and two at Gillingham.
“When I signed for Burnley in 1984, a lot of fans were blaming the board for taking Bond on and signing a lot of his old Man City players,” says Grewcock. “It sort of went from there. We had some good players when we got relegated in 85 – Micky Phelan, Wayne Biggins, Kevin Hird, Bryan Flynn, Tommy Hutchison – we thought we had a decent side. But that was when the slide began.”
Departures and cost-cutting followed. A mid-table finish in 1985-86 was followed by a season from hell, with Grewcock’s form one of its few positives. By the final weekend Burnley had slumped to the bottom after a calamitous post-Christmas run that included a 6-0 home shellacking by Hereford in front of fewer than 2,000. Their manager, Brian Miller – a title-winner as a Burnley player in 1960 – had been unable to stop the rot, and his side found themselves duking it out with Torquay and Lincoln – above them by one and two points respectively – to avoid the one relegation spot, needing a win against Orient for survival.
“We got sucked down,” Grewcock recalls. “We couldn’t attract people to the club, we were making no signings, we’d heard there was no money about, they were struggling to pay wages. There had been a sense that, as founder members of the league, they won’t let Burnley go down. But they would have. There was talk we’d go under – there was no money, and no backers that could have seen us through.”
Burnley averaged 3,257 that season, yet in their hour of need the whole town turned out – officially, 15,781 were present for Orient’s visit but it looked like many more. Traffic into the town was jammed, kick-off delayed 15 minutes – and the atmosphere inside the ground frenzied. “Ooh it was a good atmosphere – I’d never played in front of that many people at Turf Moor before,” says Grewcock, “but the realisation that possibly you could be out of the league overshadowed everything, you couldn’t enjoy it.”
Turf Moor was throbbing. Burnley’s Longside was a terrace nostalgist’s dream – cavernous and, on this occasion, cacophonous, crammed to the rafters along two-thirds with its final section reserved for the 800 or so Orient fans who’d travelled in the hope their side might clinch a place in the inaugural play-offs. Your correspondent, then a callow young teenager, was among them, in awe at, and intimidated by, the din.
Outside the ground, we had been greeted by the standard pantomime-hooligan graffiti of the period (“Enjoy this game – it will be your last”). Inside it, a number of home fans had climbed into the roof struts of the stand and inched their way to positions on the stanchions above us. The Orient manager, Frank Clark, said he had been advised by police before the game that they would be unable to guarantee his team’s safety should the visitors win.
Yet when the game started Orient were the better side, playing with a confidence born of an inspired second half of the season in which they rose from relegation bother to the play-off race. They had a soft centre though, and as the interval approached Grewcock would exploit it – and in style.
He takes up the story: “I picked the ball up on the right, cut in, beat a couple of players, bent it with my weaker foot and it went in the bottom left-hand corner.” Bedlam ensued. “I wouldn’t say it settled the nerves, but it gave us something to build on.”
Half-time elsewhere brought news that Torquay were 0-2 down at home to Crewe (David Platt among the scorers) and Lincoln behind at Swansea. Burnley went off at the interval with fresh confidence and soon doubled their lead, Ian Britton heading in Grewcock’s cross three minutes after the restart. But Orient responded within 10 minutes when their best player Alan Comfort (who would become a vicar after injury-enforced retirement) pounced on a loose ball inside the area and lashed home.
Orient still needed two more for the play-offs but Burnley were hanging on again. Comfort missed a late chance. As time ticked by, fans began scaling the perimeter fences but the bravado could not conceal nerves. Final whistles went elsewhere – Lincoln had lost, and Torquay had grabbed a survival-clinching equaliser in time added on after their defender Jim McNichol had been bitten by a police dog.
And Burnley hung on. The final whistle prompted the pitch invasion police had feared, but a joyful one. Orient’s players got off swiftly and safely; their fans meanwhile were assailed with handshakes and scarf-swaps between the fences. Instead Lincoln, who hadn’t been bottom all season, lost their League place.
“We had no celebration,” Grewcock recalls. “We went to the players’ lounge, had a couple of beers, and everyone dispersed and did their own thing, I went out for a meal with friends. It was just a sense of relief. The buildup was horrible, not a pleasant situation to be in, I feel for every team now that’s in that position.”
The introduction of one-up one-down brought assumptions that relegation would kill its victims but Lincoln returned as Conference champions the following season. It would take Burnley another five years to gain promotion from the fourth tier, a year after Grewcock’s departure, after which he was swiftly forced by injury to retire. It would be stretching it to say that his goal and Burnley’s nervy win on that breathless sunny afternoon laid the foundations for their current exalted status, but “the Orient game”, as it is still simply known among Clarets, remains as significant a part of the club’s folklore as any.
