Racism still blights our club

Plus: Mission to Burnley is PR fluff

I would have loved to have written about the game in this week’s newsletter, but I just can’t. Our ‘fans’ have embarrassed the rest of us yet again - and I’m sick of it.

Racism still blights our club

Before a ball was even kicked this season, Burnley supporters showed themselves up.

Returning to the Premier League means players taking the knee prior to kick-off. And at Turf Moor, players taking the knee means the sound of loud boos from the stands.

Let’s not hide behind claiming it is a “minority” of people, whatever that means. Is it a couple of thousand, out of 20,000 or so home fans? Or a few hundred? That’s still a lot.

For what it’s worth, where I was sat in NU2, there was a lot of booing. Absolutely nobody else near me was clapping to try to drown out the racists. It was shameful.

At the risk of sounding like a stuck record, booing taking the knee is a racist act.

It’s this simple: Taking the knee is a gesture against racism, so to boo it is racist.

It’s too easy for those who do not boo to go on about it being a “minority” and claim those who boo do not represent our fanbase. But they do.

We might not be them, but they are us. It’s not a one-off, is it?

We are the club of the ‘White Lives Matter’ banner. We are the club of Nazi salutes at Spurs. We are the only Premier League club with loud boos when the knee is taken.

Not long after the boos, my partner - in her first game as a season-ticket holder - heard someone shouting racist abuse behind her. Reckon the two things are linked?

Racist abuse is not even rare at Turf Moor. If we are honest, most of us have heard it. And apparently, if you report it to the club, nothing is done about the culprits.

Vincent Kompany spoke typically eloquently when he was asked about it, but imagine how being put in that position made him feel? The league’s only black manager, in his first game at that level, having to be asked about his own fans being racist. It stinks.

Spare a thought for 18-year-old Luca Koleosho, whose first ever experience of Turf Moor was having to listen to knuckle-dragging morons booing him take the knee.

It should have been a proud moment, returning to the Premier League as champions. Add in Rico Lewis being struck by something thrown from the stands and another idiot invading the pitch and it was an embarrassing day to support Burnley.

I don’t want to share a club with these wankers. Time to stamp this shit out. For good.

Mission to Burnley is PR fluff

Either side of the City game on Friday night I watched the four episodes of Mission to Burnley, the new Sky documentary that charts the club since the ALK takeover.

If you’ve not seen it yet, my advice is… don’t bother. Yes, it’s great to see all those fantastic moments like Manuel Benson’s winner at Ewood and the parade around the town to mark the title again, but it’s not a particularly good piece of television.

Like a lot of these documentaries - and there are A LOT of them - it’s purely for PR.

Chairman Alan Pace might have claimed in the media that he didn’t want to do a documentary, but I don’t buy that. He definitely gets far more airtime than necessary and there is essentially no criticism of him, despite the controversy over the takeover.

The best parts of Mission to Burnley are the behind-the-scenes bits with our manager going through video analysis sessions in granular detail. Kompany comes across brilliantly, both as a tremendous communicator and a truly formidable leader.

There’s absolutely nothing of the fans and virtually nothing of the players, despite us having a very charismatic squad. I’m in it more than Josh Cullen, for example.

MtB is a pretty superficial piece of work and far from essential viewing, even for fans.

Perhaps it is asking too much for a four-episode doc spanning about 15 months to go into the same detail as the Wrexham and Sunderland series - the best of a crowded field of club documentaries - but Mission to Burnley is far short of that standard.

What did you make of Mission to Burnley? Let me know in the comments, or reply to this email with your views. You can also get in touch with me via Twitter (if it still exists).