Dave on the Leeds game...
Dave Thornley gets his mojo on to offer his post-match review of the Clarets beating Dirty Weeds at home on Saturday.
Fixtures against Leeds invariably resonate with memories of previous encounters dating back to the seventies and the spats between Bob Lord, Manny Cousins, Jimmy Adamson and Don Revie, which would spill out of the boardroom, into the dressing rooms and onto the pitch.
Leeds is a less brutal regime nowadays but the rivalry remains, most recently heightened by the two clubs going head-to-head in a Championship race which went to the wire and was only settled in Leeds? favour on the tie-break of goal difference.
During that campaign, the teams met at Turf Moor over the Christmas period and played out a distinctly un-festive nil-nil draw, a game which re-defined tedium for all who watched it.
Fortunately, yesterday?s match between the two teams, both now in the Premier League of course, made for far more enthralling viewing the highlight of which was a goal for the ages, but more of that later.
After the Clarets? defeat in the previous match at Villa Park, I suggested in my piece on the game that Zian Flemming would be worth a start in attack in place of a struggling Lyle Foster. As it transpired, Foster returned from international duty with an injury which ruled him out of yesterday?s game and so Flemming took over the duty of leading the attack.
Although he didn?t score, he showed a willingness to put himself about and discomfort the Leeds defence and generally improved the level of threat carried by Burnley in the first half.
When Leeds conducts their review of the match they might reflect on the irony of one of their defenders busting a gut to concede a throw-in rather than a corner from which Burnley would have been unlikely to score.
Instead, an exchange of passes between Kyle Walker and Jacob Bruun Larsen allowed Walker to deliver a superb cross which Lesley Ugochukwu headed unchallenged into the corner of the Leeds goal.
Leeds could ? should ? have equalized when Aaronson had the goal at his mercy only to find Martin Dubravka throwing his body into the path of his shot and deflecting it onto the post. Lucky, perhaps, but Dubravka?s excellent piece of goalkeeping entitled him to a slice of luck.
As the second half progressed, Leeds would dominate possession, but created little to discomfort Burnley?s defence in which Maxime Esteve and Kyle Walker in particular were magnificent.
Indeed, it was Walker whose surging run up the right wing was a precursor to Burnley?s second, and decisive, goal. Slipping the ball to Florentino who in turn passed to Tchaouna in space, thirty yards from goal from where he unleashed a fierce shot arrowing into the top corner of the Leeds net, a breath taking goal.
The visitors? efforts to summon up a comeback inevitably floundered on the Burnley defence and as the match drew to its close a bit of tetchiness crept in. Surely the introduction off the bench of Hannibal and Ashley Barnes couldn?t have had anything to do with that, could it?
Out of the relegation places and on to seven points from eight games, more or less the points trajectory which would see Burnley safe, and a trip to winless Wolves next week. Things are looking up.
Editor?s note: I?ve mentioned elsewhere the new boys are blending in nicely, and it?s not beyond the imagination to visualise the Clarets escaping the terrors of relegation. The new boys are certainly showing the enthusiasm for the fight.
