Even at levels below the Premiership, players move around and chop and change and the days are very much gone when a top player would give most, if not all of his playing career, to the club where he started as a boy. There are exceptions; Scholes, Giggs, Gary Neville at Manchester United, Gerrard and Carragher at Liverpool. But they are a rarity.

     Jimmy McIlroy belonged to a time when loyalty and long service were prized and were the norm. Tom Finney spent the whole of his career at Preston, Nat Lofthouse at Bolton and Ronnie Clayton at Blackburn. Eventually, however, as players began to reap the benefits of the abolition of the maximum wage, the shackles of subservience were loosened – but only a little. The manager and chairman of a club still reigned supreme and a player still did as he was told. To ask for a transfer was a bold decision on the part of any player. If the chairman or manager took exception to that, then that player could be as good as ostracised, banished to the reserves and made to train on his own. Taken to extremes, his career could be frozen, as good as over. Contracts were binding.

     But conversely a player could be placed on a transfer list and sold by a club and there was little he could do about it. When his sell-by-date came, that was it. The player had little or no say in the matter.

     At Burnley, players had long been sold as a matter of course, partly because there were so many to choose from, and so many coming through the youth system, and partly because money was always needed to meet the costs of running the club and an increasingly ambitious chairman, Bob Lord. But players sold so far had been either peripheral players or those who had reached the end of the best of their careers. One or two went because they might just have irked Bob Lord or the manager – Peter Mackay for example, even though his scoring record was exceptional. Jimmy McIlroy rated him the best finisher and poacher he ever played with, able instinctively to score from whatever angle or direction the ball came to him. But, if a player annoyed the chairman of Burnley Football Club, Bobby Seith in the Championship season, he was sold.

     But no one of the category and ability of McIlroy had ever been sold that spectators could recall. There had been the young Tommy Lawton just before the war, and way before that, Bob Kelly in the 1920s. But at post-war Burnley, the sale of an ever-present iconic player like McIlroy was unheard of.

     The three main characters in the saga were the manager Harry Potts, the chairman Bob Lord, and of course McIlroy himself. Only the latter remains to tell the story and he professes to be baffled by it even now after all these years. In recent times perhaps only the Beckham sale at Manchester United, prompted by a manager who had lost all patience with his celebrity status can compare for surprise and shock value. But whereas the McIlroy sale is still talked about in Burnley over 40 years after the event, it is hard to imagine Mancunians talking about the Beckham transfer 40 years from now. The Beckham saga filled the newspaper pages but within a year he had been replaced by other ‘galacticos’ and the fuss subsided. Does anyone at Old Trafford bother about it today; since his departure more titles and trophies have been won and other great players have joined the club one after the other.

   The world outside of Burnley still asks who shot Kennedy, or what happened to Princess Diana but it cares little about why one player was sold in 1963 at Turf Moor. But I’d hazard a guess if the answer was available to just one of those questions, Burnley fans of that particular era would choose to know the reason why McIlroy was sold.

     The reasons for this sale remain, to fans, as big a mystery today as they did then and the stories and rumours have grown over the years. There’s a varied selection:

 1.   There was a major fall-out between Harry Potts and McIlroy about his playing role.  

 2.   “Just what have you done to upset Bob Lord and Harry Potts? What have you been up to, and who with?” asked his great friend Danny Blanchflower who telephoned him immediately.

 3.   “Either he goes or you go,” said Bob Lord to Harry Potts.

 4.   “We want the same money as he gets,” said a posse of the emerging Burnley younger stars players knocking on a worried Bob Lord’s door when the last thing Lord wanted was everyone on McIlroy’s wages.

5.   He was good friends with an ex director, Reg Cook and his son, whom Bob Lord didn’t like. “I’ll choose my own friends,” said McIlroy to Adamson who warned him that Lord did not approve.

6.   The club was desperate for money after two months of inactivity due to a bad winter.

7.   He wasn’t performing any more and was past his best, said several Press reports.

8.   “He doesn’t try and doesn’t train, we’re fed up,” said a group team mates in an early display of player power.

9. “You’re not playing to your own high standards any more,” Harry Potts told him.    

10. He had a poor game, according to Press reports, against Liverpool in the Cup replay in February and then returned home, not on the team coach but with his friend Reg Cook’s son and this was the last straw for Bob Lord.

11.   ‘Selling Mac will balance the budget’, wrote Bob Lord in the Evening Telegraph in a lengthy piece, (full article in appendices). Yet this clearly contradicts Lord’s continual insistence that it was always Harry Potts’ decision, since Potts never had any input into the financial decisions at the club. Nor did Potts’ eventual explanations for the transfer ever include the need to balance budgets.

      You take your pick from any of the above stories from the rumour mill. But the further puzzle is that if Jimmy Mac’s own explanation is correct, that is to say his friendship with the Cooks; then it was clearly and solely Lord’s decision, even though Lord always maintained that it was Harry Potts’ who made the decision. To this day, Jimmy Mac and John Cook remain the closest of friends.    

     All that is known for certain is that Lord held a board meeting on the Sunday after the Tuesday evening Liverpool game. “We’re selling him,” Lord informed them all.

     It was, incidentally, round about this time that Lord (forever in the back page news) and Potts might have been lampooned mercilessly on the TV satire show, That Was the Week That Was, in a script written by football writer Brian Glanville. The sketch making fun of Lord in the role of the ‘tyrant’ and Potts in the role of the subservient ‘yes man’ was never shown. Glanville has always believed that the title win was less to do with Harry Potts, than the presence of great players at their peak like McIlroy and Jimmy Adamson, and the foundations laid by Alan Brown.

     The only certainties in the saga, however, are that the Cup-tie was lost, the club was desperate for money, an impromptu board meeting was held, and McIlroy was informed by manager Potts that he was being transfer listed.

     It was in 1999 that he spoke to what was then the Lancashire Evening Telegraph about the decision that had been made years earlier. “It was the worst day of my football career. I can remember Harry Potts calling me into the office at quarter-to-ten to break the news and say he was putting me on the list. Immediately I knew it wasn’t Harry’s decision because he looked in pain. He looked more stunned than I did, so obviously he had been told by Bob Lord that I had to go. In fact some time afterwards I learned from a Burnley director that Lord had called a meeting at his factory on the Sunday morning and he said to Harry Potts, ‘McIlroy must go’. And I gather then Harry said to him ‘I still need him’ and Lord is supposed to have said, ‘Well either he goes or you go’. I was very friendly with the family of a Burnley director who everyone knew Bob Lord detested. He was called Reg Cook. At one time he was vice-chairman of the club and I was very friendly with his son and in fact in away games his son used to bring me back in his car. I can remember Jimmy Adamson saying to me one day that Bob Lord won’t like this, being so friendly and seeing so much of the Cooks. But I thought, ‘I’m not going to let Bob Lord choose my friends for me’. I’m convinced that’s the sole reason why Bob Lord put me on the transfer list. I feel sure that my friendship with the Cooks ended my career here.”

     Possibly Jimmy’s explanation is partly correct in that the Cook friendship was simply the last straw for Bob Lord. It is doubtful that it was the sole reason and was probably one of several.

     Even without the transfer controversy it was a season not without its problems including; the bad weather, a brutal Cup-tie at Tottenham (which Burnley won 3 – 0), Press and FA criticisms of Harry Potts, and a training incident when Gordon Harris assaulted Jimmy Adamson.

     It was after the Spurs game that Burnley were next drawn against Liverpool and the first game in Burnley was a 1 – 1 draw. The replay did not take place until midweek on February 20^th. It was the catalyst for the bombshell that was to follow.

     The story is well known. In extra time Adam Blacklaw as good as gifted the game to Liverpool. He was an outstanding goalkeeper and had very much kept them in this tie at Turf Moor. But even the best goalkeepers are not perfect. He elected to kick a back pass from Alex Elder straight back up the field from the edge of the area. It hit Ian St. John who was just yards away. St. John was onto it in a flash and would have scored but for Blacklaw bringing him down. The penalty was put away by Ronnie Moran. Burnley, fancied for Wembley again, were out and McIlroy according to Press reports had not played particularly well. He was described as spending most of his time dropping deep, ineffectively meandering in no-mans-land and never living up to his reputation. Newspapers pointed to Burnley’s uncustomary defensive style and that they had abandoned their usual sweet-moving attacking style and Liverpool were never put under any pressure. McIlroy later defended himself saying that he had only been playing to manager Potts’ instructions.

     There hadn’t been a League game since December 29^th and there was no game on the Saturday following the Liverpool game. On the Monday McIlroy was called into Potts’ office and given the news. Little elaboration at this stage came from Harry Potts to journalists and it was the player who gave the gist of the conversation to the Press.

   “I went into Harry Potts’ office and he told me straight out that the board of directors had decided on his recommendation to place me on the transfer list. I asked him why and he told me he was disappointed with my playing efforts and that there was nothing more to it.”

     McIlroy added that it had then been explained to him that it was purely to do with the playing side of things. It was nothing to do with finance (in contradiction to what Bob Lord later said) and that there was no friction between himself and Harry Potts, the directors or Bob Lord. If this was the explanation he was baffled. Surely if this was the reason the normal thing would have been to play him in the reserves for a while in order to recover his best form.

     After the meeting Potts suggested to McIlroy that he should go home and miss the rest of training. This he did and gave the news to his shocked wife Barbara. Within 24 hours supporters were starting petitions, holding meetings, bombarding the Press, demanding answers, threatening never to set foot in Turf Moor again, and daubing graffiti around the town.

     Granville Shackleton recalls being at the club and being told the news. He also recalled that an astonished Ray Pointer was in the vicinity and on hearing what was going on, rushed off to tell the other players. John Connelly was on his way to an England gathering, and remembers saying a shocked “bloody hell” to himself when he heard.

     It seemed that everyone who possessed pen and paper wanted to have their say and put down their views, including Tom Finney and Danny Blanchflower. “Burnley must speak up,” wrote Finney, noting that no official Press statement had yet been made. He added that McIlroy had commented to him that he was perhaps caught up in club politics, possibly in connection with helping his father-in-law buy and sell club shares, not something that Bob Lord would welcome. Or perhaps it involved his friendship with the Cooks and that it had not gone down too well that after the traumatic Liverpool game he had disappeared all too quickly in the Cooks’ car.

     Blanchflower’s lengthy, thoughtful piece in a Sunday newspaper hinted at financial reasons and that other players were resentful of his star status and backslaps he received. They resented his higher salary, he suggested. He implied that because of this, the financial balance of the club was being undermined as other players sought parity and clearly the only way to nip this in the bud was to sell McIlroy. Blanchflower alleged that he had spoken at length to his colleague, and dwelt in the article on how McIlroy would now feel until the transfer was resolved. He would be in a vacuum, feel isolated, and there would be a definite uneasiness in the dressing room.

     “It must be finance,” he wrote.

     When they beat Tottenham, Bob Lord and his merry men probably thought they would win the Cup. But Liverpool had other ideas. Another Cup run to Wembley would have put thousands of pounds in the Burnley kitty. Maybe they were counting on that. And on the added support that a good Cup run would bring to their League matches. It’s been a hard winter. Funds are low all round. McIlroy is getting more money than the others. Perhaps the others are starting to ask for the same. Simple solution: sell McIlroy; get some cash, cut the feet from under the others with regard to asking for more. That’s better for the club in the long run or at least it would seem to be.

      Blanchflower as ever spoke good sense. He certainly phoned Jimmy Mac; maybe he phoned other players. And McIlroy himself, not long afterwards, in a daily newspaper alluded to the possible discontent felt by other players that he was on a higher salary.

     Were these the reasons then that he was transfer-listed; a combination of the club being in desperate need of money, and player unrest? Lord had plans to build a giant new stand. No club can build stands without money, nor can it pay wages. And, if player unrest was a factor, this was certainly not something the club would have wanted to make public. How badly it would have reflected on the legendary family spirit.

     At last the club spoke. “POTTS ENDS HIS SILENCE” was the Burnley Express headline on March 6^th after Burnley and Stoke had sealed the deal that took Jimmy Mac to the Potteries. It had taken this long for anything to come from Potts or Lord, the silence being another factor that aggravated supporters.

      When I first told Jimmy McIlroy last Monday that Burnley had decided to put him on the transfer list, it was agreed between us that there should be no public slanging match. I have seen that this has not occurred and because of it I have been unable to say to the Press until now any more than that this was a club matter. Now I can tell you our side of the story. Jimmy McIlroy has left Burnley and the only person responsible for this is Jimmy McIlroy himself.  

      Potts could make it no clearer than that, and then went on to say that he had not been giving 100%, that Jimmy on his own admission had become complacent and that no club could afford the luxury of a player not giving every effort. McIlroy could have stayed at Turf Moor for the rest of his playing days with a third benefit and testimonial game to be arranged, Harry explained, but it was his lack of playing effort that was the reason behind the decision to sell him.

     Potts’ statement is therefore plausible, but if there are indeed other reasons as suggested by McIlroy himself in the Daily Express, they are left out. They are not what a manager like Harry Potts with his multitude of loyalties would want to make public.

     Lord stayed silent and it was left to the manager to make the statements. As a result, it was Potts, as much if not more than Lord, who was subjected to abuse and criticism from Burnley people. His wife found slogans and insults on their car and was greatly upset by it. Their children were taunted at school. Not much more than two years earlier he had won a Championship for them, played in Europe and less than a year earlier had reached Wembley. Now he was being pilloried.

     More than 40 years on, Jimmy McIlroy maintains that he is still baffled by the whole thing. “When I asked him why I was being transfer listed he replied that he didn’t think I had been doing it on the field. So, I asked, well why not drop me and put me in the reserves? He answered that you don’t drop players like me. Since then I have always thought, well then why sell me?”

     But sold he was, to Stoke City, after several days of wrangling and haggling over the price; his friendship with the Cooks and return home to Burnley with John Cook after the Liverpool defeat probably the last straw for an irate Bob Lord. We in Burnley can still speculate and talk about all the theories and rumours that abound regarding the reasons for his sale. Perhaps Blanchflower’s finance theory was correct, perhaps Potts’ part of the story was correct, perhaps Jimmy is correct about the Cooks. Maybe there were a number of contributory reasons and it all came to a head after that devastating Cup-tie result.

     Jimmy McIlroy can have the last word. “As far as I’m concerned, only two people know why I was placed on the transfer list and that secret will remain with them. By coincidence they lie close by each other in the graveyard at Read Church.”

     He has had a remarkable impact on the small town of Burnley and its people. It is for that reason that his story is worth the telling.

Keep an eye out for the next installment of this great book.