When Vincent Kompany and Burnley won the Championship with 101 points and followed it with a summer of spending more than £90m on players, few in Lancashire could have anticipated the club having something in common with the 1970-71 Newport team of the Fourth Division, but after seven straight defeats at Turf Moor they have matched the Welsh club’s record for the worst home start to an English league season.
Burnley’s appalling form continued with defeat to West Ham despite leading until the 86th minute, as a Dara O’Shea own goal and Tomas Soucek volley settled the match late on. Jay Rodriguez had scored from the spot to put the hosts ahead after Luca Koleosho was brought down in the box, some would argue for a second time, to give the fans hope of witnessing a first Turf Moor victory of the season.
“It’s what makes this game beautiful but what also makes it hard. It is a tough one to take but it is still a universal recipe: you have to get up and keep going,” Kompany said. “I was looking at this game and come minute 86, the game is what it is, and you have to play until the end. At that point what I would have said is how outstanding the performance was on the ball, off the ball, disciplined, mature but as it is football is shaped – fairly – by the result and every minute of the game is as important as the first one.”
Unsurprisingly, a match between the bottom club with the worst scoring record in the league and a side missing their top goalscorer, Jarrod Bowen – who has eight Premier League goals to his name – was short of attacking threat. Koleosho, Burnley’s shining light in an otherwise bleak season, made the most notable impact.
The winger drove into the box and touched the ball past Vladimir Coufal before gladly accepting the outstretched leg of the full-back to trip over. The referee, Sam Barrott, pointed for a goal-kick and, despite clear contact, VAR did not overturn the decision after a check.
Kompany said: “The message to the players is: ‘Nothing is going to be given,’ and if nothing is being given, you have to go grab the bull by the horns and not wait for people to make decisions for you. Margins make a big difference for us.”
The teenager got his reward soon after the break when he went on a mazy run against icy defenders, who were unable to move at the same speed as they watched him slip past until he reached the box where Mohammed Kudus caught him on the foot. Even though the contact was far less obvious, the penalty stood and Rodriguez, 15 years Koleosho’s senior, fired it down the middle for his first goal of the season as Burnley collectively reached double figures.
It was the third time Burnley had failed to hold a lead at home as their naivety was proven once more. The entire team dropped deeper immediately after the 49th-minute opener but held their own from then on, only to receive the sucker punch with fewer than five minutes on the clock when Kudus burst down the right and fired a cross towards Divin Mubama, but the ball went in via the unfortunate O’Shea.
Kudus, the man who gave away the penalty, more than made amends for his earlier indiscretion with a second assist for Soucek as his cross found the midfielder in space at the back post to strike into an empty net for his fourth in four matches for club and country, silencing Turf Moor in the process.
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“The climax was great,” David Moyes said. “It shows a lot of the things we have got about this team: a bit of resilience, we stuck at it, never wilted, had to keep trying to find ways to get a goal and it didn’t look like we were going to. We probably didn’t play our best today, a lot of our players were nowhere near their levels but, ultimately, we got three points in the Premier League.”
The good news for Kompany is that Newport won 10 of their final 21 games and were re‑elected to the Football League, although Bobby Ferguson was sacked after the seventh home defeat. The bad news is that Burnley are rock bottom with four points from 13 matches, giving few indications they are going to vacate 20th, and football is a meritocracy.
