From the Archive: Burnley, Ian Britton, and the many faces of heroism
This evening we're going to 1987, and the tale of how an over-excited police dog may have helped may have kept one of the Football League's founding members up.
When we close our eyes at night and imagine what we might do or might have done as professional footballers, we surrender to a world of glory. Scoring the winning goal to win a league title, perhaps, or drinking champagne from a silver cup that we have just played a crucial role in winning. Football, however, is a game with a multitude of faces, and there are exactly as many losers as there are winners of matches, and considerably smaller numbers of winners of trophies and medals than there are those who never win anything at all.
We call them “journeymen”, of course. The players who don’t necessarily scale incredible heights, who are the ballast of our game. To describe them as such may sound derogatory in nature, but it absolutely isn’t meant to be. It can be a hard life and frequently a thankless one, with the constant, anxiety-causing background hum of the possibility of career-ending injury or contracts not being renewed, but without them our game – and this is particularly the case in England, with its deep, deep pyramid system – most likely wouldn’t be able to function.
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