HASN’T HE DONE WELL
From punter to press officer to senior executive, Burrows’ Fir Park journey is surely one to behold
AS HIS train breezed through the Alps on a mission to Austria’s version of the middle of nowhere, Alan Burrows was at least amused by his ‘man alone’ status on the winding trip to a Motherwell pre-season. The imaginary Sound of Music tones in his head were interrupted by a hilarious phone message from ‘T In The Park’ back home — a photo of his mate with John Boyle and a bottle of Buckfast at the festival.
‘What on earth am I doing here?’ Burrows asked himself on the final leg of a taxi, train, plane, bus then another train trek for a summer holiday watching his team play three friendlies. The answer to that question he posed ten years ago this week has been a unique success story to celebrate in Scottish football.
For on that trip, the punter with the camera was invited to join the club as a reporter. Then came the press officer job. Promotion to general manager was next. Since last summer, he’s been on the board as chief operating officer.
It’s been quite a journey. Not on the scale of the one where Hannibal’s generals led their elephants over the Alps to strike at Rome, of course. All Burrows had to do was pitch up at the village of Obertauern safely through the mountain trail, write some copy and take pictures for his own fans’ website.
They just so happened to greatly impress then Fir Park secretary Stewart Robertson and manager Mark McGhee and Burrows happily took a £3,000 pay cut to leave North Lanarkshire council’s finance department for football.
Now there are words attributed to Hannibal adorning the wall in Burrows’ office at the stadium. The words translate as ‘We will either find a way, or make one’. Antonio Conte scribbled the quote down on gifts he classily handed to every member of Chelsea staff at Christmas.
Burrows is toasting a decade at Motherwell this week, from the most humble beginning. So he is as unlikely as Conte to lose track of his roots. Unlikely to be too proud to conveniently dismiss Paul Quinn, Marc Fitzpatrick and Steven McGarry rugby-tackling him, stripping him naked and bundling him into a stream on that first pre-season. And he will never forget the tragic event, only six months into his employment, that reminds him in the toughest times to keep a perspective on problems because no troublesome incident or fraught financial situation can be as awful.
‘Of all the people that made me welcome and settled and accepted, Phil O’Donnell was a lovely guy, the captain who did that,’ said Burrows. ‘As a supporter involved in the Fans’ Trust, I was worried I’d be seen as an outsider desperate to be in there or that they wouldn’t trust me. Phil helped me with that.
‘We could go out on the pitch now, stand there and it would be louder than it was at the point Phil was on the ground. You could sense something was seriously wrong. Through any troubles we encounter, I always try to tell myself nothing can surpass that for being so horrific.
‘In the last year or two we’ve flirted a bit close to the trapdoor, you worry about people’s mortgages. But I know there can never be anything as bad as four young kids with their mother at the game losing their dad. That’s how I bring myself back down to earth because everyone in football can get caught up in the circus and use words like disaster about the game.’
Burrows learned about organising media promotion on the hoof, with help from boss McGhee, who guided Motherwell to third place in 2007/08 despite the O’Donnell tragedy and a chewed-up pitch from sharing with doomed Gretna.
Consistent high marks under McGhee then Jim Gannon, Craig Brown and Stuart McCall kept Motherwell regularly in the upper reaches of the top flight and into Europe. Rangers’ demotion caused many financial problems for the club but catapulted the Fir Park side into Champions League qualifiers.
At the height of the achievement, Burrows was collecting awards aplenty too — for his excellence in the club’s communications department. After landing one of them at an end-of-season league night, he endured his own brush with death.
‘Stuart McCall might well have saved my life,’ he recalled of the May 2012 drama. ‘I was in the car with him and Alan Marshall, our safety officer. We didn’t get our steak dinner until late, so I thought it was heartburn. I hoped it would go away but when Stuart was getting dropped off, he looked at me and told Alan to take me straight to hospital. It was a blood clot on my lung. My stomach was injected with blood thinners. If you don’t get that done quickly enough, you can die.
‘I have to thank Stuart because I might have just struggled on and gone home. He’s the nicest guy I’ve ever worked with. I miss him a lot. I sat out in the stand and bubbled that day he left for the last time.’
Burrows said his farewells to McCall as general manager. Yet he considered walking away from the club in 2014 early on as an Argentinian consortium circled around the club during its ownership void and ex-chairman Boyle’s shareholding was up for grabs.
‘To John’s credit he saw it through to the end and transitioned it to fan ownership via Les (Hutchison) for a year,’ said Burrows. ‘But I had only been in the job for 14 days in June 2014 when he told me he was selling to Gianni Paladini.
‘Remember the documentary at QPR? The mad guy kicking the chairs, always shouting at the manager? He flew here, stood on the pitch and said: “Don’t like the main stand. We’ll just knock that down”. I stood there thinking: “Holy s***”. A couple of months later the Argentinians came in. I didn’t meet them. But I said to John: “If that’s happening, I’m chucking it”.
‘In the end, John sold his stake to Les for a pound. He could have walked away with a significant fee from the Argentinians. He walked away from money.’
The biggest highlight? That was being pinned against the back of the Pittodrie stand by a furious Aberdeen fanatic on May 14, 2014 as Motherwell pinched second place with an outrageous stoppage-time goal.
‘I was going to be general manager but still did my old job of co-commentary for Motherwell TV,’ he recalled. ‘Big Sutty (John Sutton) smashed into Jamie Langfield — a foul every day of the week. I can’t believe Steven McLean didn’t give Aberdeen a free-kick.
‘Mark Reynolds handled on the line and I was screaming handball before (Craig) Reid scored the rebound. I threw my headset off, ran down the stairs shouting and screaming. The whole stand looked at me. I’d lost the plot, professionalism out the window.
‘An extra couple of hundred grand, finishing second, huge release of emotion. Next thing, Aberdeen casual, full Stone Island gear, grabbed me by the throat. Along with the Champions League game against Panathinaikos, that was the highlight.
‘A UEFA delegate spoiled it by saying he’d fine us if we played the Champions League theme. It was only a qualifier. We should have taken the fine and played it because we’d probably never get the chance again.’