I only ever managed to speak to Jimmy Adamson once. It must have been sometime in 2005 and I knew that by then he rarely spoke to people about football. He’d had nothing to do with the game since the time he left Leeds United in 1980. They’d joked there that he was the Yorkshire Ripper. The police used to go round the pubs of Leeds and play the infamous hoax tape of the Geordie voice belonging to the guy who claimed to be the Ripper. They’d ask, ‘Does anyone recognise this voice?’ Voices would shout back, ‘It’s Jimmy bloody Adamson.’ By 1980 he was none too popular at Elland Road.

     The end for him came after yet another defeat when Leeds lost 3-0 to Stoke City on 6 September 1980. He’d had a year of abuse, ‘Adamson Out’ chants, banners and demonstrations. The Stoke defeat was already the fourth of the new season in just five games. Each day he must have longed to return to the warmth and sanctuary of his home and the love of his wife, May. He kept his innermost thoughts to himself during this period and afterwards said nothing during all the years that he was out of the game. If he endured untold heartache, then he put on a brave front. If the pressure became intolerable a drink or two blurred the edges. As each Stoke goal went home he surely knew it was one more reason for the directors he could never trust to dismiss him. The win against Norwich a couple of weeks earlier had given false hope as his arm punched the air in jubilation at the end of the game. Following that there was a home defeat against Leicester City and more vicious fury from a seething, savage section of the crowd betraying their tribal Brigantes origins. The writing was on the wall; it was a matter of time before the curtain came down on what only a few years earlier at Burnley had seemed such a glittering managerial career following his golden years as a player.

     A couple of drinks before the Stoke game would have eased his tensions, made facing the intimidating crowd a little more bearable, but by the end of the game he was under no illusions that this was it, the end of the line and a merciful release from an unmanageable job with its incessant demands and impossible directors. Leeds United was the Bermuda Triangle of football management and would remain so for some time to come.

     He retired into a shell and avoided interviews; for consolation he enjoyed his holidays abroad, another drink or two, and he played Crown Green Bowls. People still knocked at his door wanting to chat, or have things signed but he was frequently unavailable. Years later, by the time I decided to call it was usually his wife May who answered the door. His health was none too clever and she was protective. By this time they were almost reclusive.

     It was funny the way I was asked inside. I didn’t telephone first but was driving by one day whilst writing a book about Burnley hero Willie Irvine, and thought if I don’t stop and call now, I never will. As I’d been warned, it was indeed May who opened the door.

     I smiled and spoke. ‘I’m Dave Thomas, the guy who writes the Burnley books….’

     I didn’t get the chance to even finish the sentence before she broke into the biggest smile and clapped her hands. ‘Ah Dave,’ she spoke with clear affection, ‘Come in, come in, Jimmy will be so surprised and pleased to see you.’

     I knew immediately the mistake she had made. She thought I was THE Dave Thomas the footballer, the player who had joined Burnley as a young lad, and Jimmy had nurtured and coached in the late 60s, a stunning player but had eventually been sold in 1972. Ironically, Dave had no reciprocal warm feelings for Jimmy but I kept quiet about that.

     ‘Come in, come in,’ May said again. In I went and not until I was in and the door had closed did I tell her that I wasn’t THAT Dave Thomas, but only the one who wrote books and had brought one as a present for Jimmy, the anthology that featured a number of his former players – Ralph Coates, Dave Thomas, Steve Kindon, Colin Waldron and Paul Fletcher.

     Mistake explained, nevertheless I was welcomed and sat for an hour or more talking about Willie Irvine and then Martin Dobson. I explained I’d love to do a book about the ‘Team of the Seventies.’ That was the label he gave to his certainty that he was developing a Burnley team that would dominate the seventies; but it hung round his neck like an albatross as soon as the team was relegated in 1971. The club rose again but bad results resumed in the autumn of 1975 and once again he was mocked for the claim he had made that they would dominate the decade. They agreed I should go again and talk more. But I never did. I telephoned some weeks later to arrange another visit to the house they had, not that far from Turf Moor, just a couple of miles up the road at Pike Hill on the way to Cliviger. Further away were the moorland hills over which I often drove, bleak and desolate on some days, beautiful on others when the sun shines and utterly stunning when the winter snows fall. It was a different May who answered. ‘No sorry, Jimmy is not well. We don’t want to see anyone.’

     I sighed; the chance was gone.

     I’ve regretted that lost opportunity ever since. There was such a legion of questions to ask about his boyhood, him and Harry Potts, him and Bob Lord, the England job, his broken dreams; for his is certainly a story of unfulfilled ambitions and hopes. And ever since then, I’ve written other books saying to myself that much as I’d like to try and fathom out the enigma that was Jimmy Adamson, it was something that seemed to pose so many difficulties.

     I’d finish one book, a year later finish another and then think, ‘What next?’ But the Adamson idea was always shelved. How could you begin to unravel the story and the changes over time of that complicated relationship between himself, Harry Potts and Bob Lord when all of them were gone? For different reasons these three men were giants in the history of the Burnley club over something like a 20-year period. Their paths were so intertwined, and their lives so inseparable, their bonds so close that it seems impossible to accept that by the time Lord died in 1981, neither Potts nor Adamson ever spoke to him until Potts on finding out how ill Lord was, went to visit him right at the very end. Worse still, Adamson and Potts did not speak to each other; and Harry’s wife, Margaret, disliked Adamson intensely. In fact her feelings bordered on abhorrence for the way she perceived that Adamson had betrayed Harry and stabbed him in the back ten years earlier at the beginning of the 70s. She wrote about this in her book Harry Potts, Margaret’s Story with total candour and obvious hurt. With Jimmy having passed away we’ll never know his side of things or the reality of Margaret’s accusations.

     So many mysteries to delve into: when did Bob Lord first begin to plan that one day Jimmy Adamson should have the Burnley manager’s job? Why did some players revere him and others quite the opposite? Why did he turn down the England manager’s job in 1962? Why did Bob Lord owe him a considerable sum of money? Why did his opinion of Harry Potts turn from what was once affection and comradeship to something that bordered on disdain? When and how did the change happen between him and Bob Lord so that a deep mutual bitterness developed? Why did that bitterness last so long and to such an intense degree, until he was persuaded to attend the opening of the suite named in his honour at the club, in 2011? Ironically, persuaded by his former players Paul Fletcher and Colin Waldron, he had agreed to visit a few years earlier than that, but the game he was to attend was on a night of monsoon rains. He sat in the boardroom with them waiting for the directors to arrive but none did and the game was postponed. For over 20 years he had not set foot in the place. He felt shunned and unwanted, his achievements neglected.

     Some questions will never be answered. We miss the opportunities to talk to people and try to solve the riddles; the answers go with them when they are no longer here and then we scold ourselves for missing the chances to ask.

     For years he had refused to attend any function at Turf Moor, but when he did at last attend a game Turf Moor, in January 2011, to open the corporate suite named in his honour in the Jimmy McIlroy Stand, he was a resident in a Care Home in Burnley. His wife May and both his daughters had died and his mind was going into that faraway place where lucidity and memory largely disappear; yet he could still remember games and results from the distant past. Sadly his daughter Julie had died in 1998 aged only 44 and his other daughter Jayne in 2005 aged only 45. Tragedy thus visited Jimmy and his wife May so cruelly. The deaths of both his daughters must have come like hammer blows. May herself then died in August 2010. His own mother had committed suicide after he had brought her to live in Burnley near him more than 50 years earlier.

     It was his former player Paul Fletcher who hosted his former boss on the occasion of the opening of the suite. Paul had become chief executive at the club and for him it was just as special as it was for Jimmy. Fletcher will forever pay Adamson the hugest compliment. ‘I was a Second Division player. Then I came here. Jimmy changed my life.’

   Jimmy arrived along with his grandchildren and was content to stay in the background as he sat talking to Jimmy McIlroy for half an hour by the large picture windows. As he seemed to edge closer to them it was then that he was asked to step outside. The Burnley fans were rapturous as he was introduced to the crowd before the game. Dementia is so cruel but he was in a good enough state of health to be aware of everything happening, including the reception he was given by the crowd when he appeared in front of them. The wounds that went back so many years were healed that day.

     ‘At that moment,’ remembers Paul Fletcher, ‘all was forgiven and he realised how wrong he had been. The club had never disliked him; it loved him.’

     Chairman of the club then was Barry Kilby and he too was present. Kilby had been a young lad at Turf Moor in his teens trying to make the grade as a footballer. ‘He was in charge when I was in the ‘A’ Team. I remember him coming over at the training ground one day to shake my hand and wish me well. When he left in 1976 he fell out of love with the club for a while. But the wounds healed.’

     That suite today is a fitting tribute. Glass cabinets line the walls and are filled with pictures, mementoes and reminders of a long and glittering career. It was the way it all ended that is such a haunting story. I looked at one photograph in particular of Jimmy and his Scottie dog in the garden of their home and looking at it you could almost sense the person. He was a family man and he and May were inseparable.

     Although he captained the title-winning side of 1959/60 and went on to play in the European Cup, the peak of his career was maybe later in 1962. He was Footballer of the Year, captain of the Wembley Cup Final side, went to Chile as assistant manager to Walter Winterbottom, and was then offered the post of England manager. His star was in the ascendancy. A long, long distinguished career was in prospect. The England job was turned down and for the next 14 years his involvement at Burnley was total before it ended so abruptly. It was a swift, unexpected termination and the start of the long and acrimonious feud with the dictatorial Bob Lord, and then a bitter period when he felt that the club did not give him the recognition he deserved.

   We all have pivotal moments in our lives. Sometimes they are the result of our own decisions; sometimes they are the consequences of other peoples’ actions. When Bob Lord sent a director to see Adamson on a cold, bleak, Monday morning in January 1976 to ask if he would resign in exchange for a generous settlement (dismissed and sweetened in the same sentence) his life was changed forever. What he had once thought, in fact had been told was a job for life, was finished. He poured out his feelings about Bob Lord in an unpublished article that must have been written sometime in 1976. It was amongst his possessions and collection of old paperwork found by his grandchildren:

TO BE CONTINUED;