Every so often, George Burley takes a walk through the park and bumps into a vision of his younger self. Kieran McKenna is practically a neighbour; the greetings are always warm and the common ground bountiful. They are the only two men alive who know exactly what it takes to guide an Ipswich side to the Premier League and both have come to understand how success in Suffolk can propel a reputation towards the stars.
In Burley’s case it was a fifth-placed finish in the 2000-01 top flight, straight after going up, that sent him into the pantheon. He was named manager of the season, the first of only five times when the recipient did not win the title, and it capped a fairytale story that barely feels possible now. “It couldn’t get any better, it was an honour, an incredible feat,” he says. “I don’t know if a team that comes up could equal or beat that now. It might never happen again.”
Burley is now 68 and a long time out of football. He moved back to Ipswich 11 years ago after his final role in management, a brief stint at Apollon Limassol. The heights of those days in the Portman Road dugout were never quite recaptured but there is little sense of what might have been. He felt he owed his family some of the time they had missed ever since, as a 15-year-old in 1972, he came down from East Ayrshire to sign terms with a club that would take off under Sir Bobby Robson. “Some managers say they can’t do without football but I’ve never been that way,” he says. “I think there’s more to life.”
Try telling that to anyone in Ipswich nowadays. The town has been abuzz since McKenna oversaw consecutive ascents, those park visits sprinkled with well-wishers falling over themselves to draw parallels with the heights of Burley’s golden era. It was a different time: back then Hermann Hreidarsson was the only significant pre-season addition to a side that had, after four years falling short of promotion, come up through the playoffs. Ipswich could only strengthen by selling and reinvesting: it was a triumph of patience, self-sustainability and, perhaps above all, exceptional coaching.
“We knew we had to bring in about £1m a year,” Burley says of those seasons when, after he joined a club doomed to relegation midway through the 1994-95 campaign, Ipswich knew they had to build iteratively. “We brought a lot of young players in and many who hadn’t been playing regularly at their clubs but had appetite and desire to improve. Players who weren’t big stars but were great footballers.
“We worked hard and got there. Half the current Ipswich team were League One players two years ago so to get there is terrific, but it’s going to be tougher for them. It’s getting more difficult now and it’s much more about survival. Anything above third bottom is going to be a success.”
Marcus Stewart, Matt Holland, Titus Bramble, Jim Magilton, Jamie Clapham and Mark Venus are among the many architects of that success namechecked by Burley as he rustles through the memory bank at a local tennis club where he is now president. He has recently contributed heavily to a book, All to Play For, that celebrates his career at Ipswich panoramically and includes recollections from a wide cast of characters involved.
Among Burley’s more eye-catching revelations in the book is that one of the country’s bigger clubs had shown interest in him during the summer of 2001. In the end he stayed put and it felt cruel that Ipswich, ambition getting the better of them with some questionable transfers and the rigours of Uefa Cup football taking their toll, were relegated the following year. Should he have taken the next step while his stock was at its peak?
“There was always going to be interest but Ipswich was my club and it didn’t feel like the right time to move on, it was a case of trying to build on what we’d done,” Burley says. “Unfortunately we couldn’t do that. We should maybe have said that we’d be happy to stay in the league again. The previous season every player had played to the top of his ability, maybe above, and to keep that standard was difficult.”
He eventually departed in October 2002 after a mixed start to a Championship season that would end with Ipswich in administration. “I felt it was too early but it was the decision the club took,” he says. “It wasn’t nice but you move on.” His close friendship with the chairman at the time, David Sheepshanks, survived and he came to appreciate the security that had underpinned those seven and a half years. “I was fortunate,” he continues. “Very few clubs have that now.”
Not everyone had it back then. Burley would manage Derby, Hearts, Southampton, Scotland and Crystal Palace before that final fling in Cyprus. There were more playoff dalliances at Pride Park and St Mary’s but each of those posts brought its upstairs issues. At Hearts he was forced to deal with Vladimir Romanov, the controversial Lithuanian owner. “When players turn up who you’d already said you didn’t want to sign … ” he says, tailing off. “No regrets, but Ipswich was a stable club and that helped me be successful.”
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The momentum from 2001 had left him and Burley admits to never quite feeling comfortable, either, with the long absences from the training pitch that international management brought. He is at his most animated when talking about training sessions under Robson, who oversaw most of his 500 appearances as Ipswich right-back, and how they informed his own managerial approach. “Passing and repetition, setting your standards high,” he says. “When you passed a ball you’d do it right, otherwise you’d stop and do it again, again and again. Even as a manager I was one of the best crossers because I could do it blindfolded. I’d done so much of it, putting it on Johnny Wark’s head. When I came back as manager I had to have faith in my way of doing it, and my way was what Bobby taught me.”
Through it all, there were hardships to overcome. In 1981 he missed Ipswich’s Uefa Cup final win over AZ Alkmaar with a cruciate injury and was told by a surgeon that he would not play again. His wife, Jill, told him to defy the odds and a year later he was playing in the World Cup with Scotland. Within two and a half months of joining as a young manager from Colchester, he was implicated in a humiliation that may have broken others as Manchester United beat Ipswich 9-0 at Old Trafford. “A horrible experience,” he says. “I knew we didn’t have a strong squad. I remember Sir Alex Ferguson being pleased that I came to see him afterwards, saying just to move on from it. That’s what I had to do. You take it on the chin.”
Tragedy struck in 2003 when Dale Roberts, Burley’s dear friend and much-admired assistant, died of cancer. Now Burley faces his own grapple with the disease; it was a shock to be diagnosed and his condition was made public in September. He has undergone six cycles of chemotherapy and an operation may follow. For all that, he looks and feels well; the affection of a community he has served so gloriously is always close at hand.
“I’ve had: ‘You’re not gonna play football any more,’ and it was: ‘All right, let’s beat that.’ This is another test. I’ve got great people looking after me and feel fine. People will stop me out walking and tell me their stories of dealing with cancer. It’s great support.”
Ipswich have been among those rallying round and Burley finds plenty of joy in attending their top-flight games under McKenna, who at 38 is the same age he was when taking the reins. “Very down to earth, doesn’t get carried away, loves being here and has his heart in the right place,” Burley says glowingly of his interlocutor from those park visits. Looking back to everything around that unsurpassable achievement in 2001, he could easily be talking about someone even closer to home.
