Preston against Burnley, an English game with moor standard or … The ultimate cultural heritage of football?

At first glance, Preston North End against Burnley seems to be a moor standard championship game.

Since the beginning of the 21st century, the clubs have met 26 times in the second animal of English football, which makes it one of the most regular encounters in division.

Such a feeling of routine was supported by the results in two league games this season, with Turf Moor meeting in Turf Moor in October and Deepdale in the early this month in goalless draw.

In February, the BBC wrote about a “typical hectic and lively Lancashire derby” -that the game then led to an investigation by the football association after a suspected racist comment by the Preston striker Milutin Osmajic (Osmajic “strongly rejected”.

You will meet again this weekend at the same venue. Only one thing is unusual on the tie because it is the first time that the rivals in the FA Cup, the oldest Cup competition in the world, got to know each other.

What makes this particularly strange is the fact that Preston and Burnley met 141 times since they became two of the founding members of the Football League and played each other at the opening weekend of a newly launched competition on September 8, 1888.

To put this in a broader historical context, Preston and Burnley is a story that is almost as old

However, Preston against Burnley is older than the public elevator in the Washington Monument, which was opened for the first time in October 1888.

In the middle of these events, the British media were consumed by a number of murders in the eastern end of London. Nineteen days after Preston Burnley blew up in Deepdale, a letter in red ink was delivered to the central news agency of the capital with a “lovely boss”, which is said to be the perpetrator of the crimes. His department led to the birth of Jack the Ripper, whose identity was never discovered.

Preston against Burnley is even older than some of the main rules of football. It was not until November 1888 that a points system was developed by the game's authorities, two for a win and one for a draw. Two months earlier, Prestons did not seem to be so important for Burnleys two, since the positions were only calculated “from Siegen, draw and loss”.

On the same day, Merseyside was not created, where Preston Burnley organized for the first time. Instead, Liverpool was in Lancashire, a County Accrington to meet Everton in Angeld. Within three years, a rental dispute was sent to Goodison Park and Liverpool FC.

Sixty miles south of Preston, Stokes Defeat by West Bromwich Albion, would be the first of 152 sessions so far. These clubs are better familiar with the founding members, but Preston against Burnley should certainly be considered the ultimate legacy.

While geography matters (Preston 21 miles from Burnley and Stoke 39 miles from West Bromwich is removed) it is certainly the turbulence of the story that is most important: after Preston marked the first season by becoming undefeated all year round and deserving the label of “Invincibles”, even though both of them have won the English levels with the four -Levern won the day of the four stages and won in the four levels. Wolverhampton hikers share the same recording, they entered the pyramid at later times and connect little else).

While Preston Blackpool considered the primary regional rival and Blackburn takes on this role for Burnley, these derbies are less common than Preston and Burnley, who played each other 50 times in the second stage, and in the first 60th recently it was a fourth lamp-bite clubs in 1985 from the third stage and Preston were the first, which were two seasons, which were two. lasted back later.

Within 24 years, Preston and Burnley switched from an upper area to a lower one. In September 1960, Burnley completed a League double over Preston, which had relegated at the end of the campaign and has never returned. A topic that was recently examined in this article about Deepdale's story of the history of Deepdale The athletes Daniel Taylor.

For the time being, Burnley seems to be the more aspiring club that had three spells in the Premier League this century (the longest between 2016 and 2022), while Preston remained in the championship for everyone (when they were relegated to League 1 in 2011).

“I assume we do it to a certain extent,” says Paul Vincent, a season stick in Deepdale when he is asked whether the supporters of Preston with jealousy about what happened at Turf Moor, a place that has observed promotions for the top flight until 2023.

Except that is difficult to measure. Preston and Burnley both have two top titles (Burnley's is new), and it could be argued that both Preston were easier to win because it was the last that were in 1890 when there were only 12 teams in the league.

Burnley ended these campaigns from below and second to the bottom fourth place and only kept their status by re -election. Preston also has two FA trophies from Burnleys One, but what Vincent really digs is the presence of Tom Finney in Preston's story, one of the greatest players and goal shooters in English football.

While some historians are pioneers with a deeper understanding of the past loans of the individual club in many different types, the scandal is associated with their success. The manager and secretary of the team at the end of the 1880s, William Sudell, was an accountant and mill owner. “His approach to recruitment, tactics and team selection was the main factor for Preston's early success,” wrote John Williams in his book about the British game, football in wind and rain.

The top scorer of the league this first season was, for example, John Goodall, a striker who signed for Preston when he was intended for Bolton Wanderers. Instead, Suddell slipped a plan to bundle it into a taxi that sent him to the next station and arrived in Preston via Blackburn.

Soudell was a determined figure that used chess pieces on Snooker tables to explain his complex game plans. However, he also secretly provided new obligations, especially those who moved from Scotland, with minor but well -paid jobs in his mill. This was before the professionalism was officially sanctioned. Williams proposes rival club directors to “often ask how he and Preston, a modest northwestern city, could possibly afford salaries of so many Scottish imports”.

After the resignation in 1892, Preston was relegated in 1894. A year later, Sudell was convicted of thousands of pounds from his mill, with Preston's wasteful wages and costs being financed. “It was one of the original financial scandals of English football,” wrote Williams. The fraud of almost half a million pounds in today's money led to a three -year prison sentence for Soudell.

Burnley has recently been a Champions of England (1960-Preston became her last performance this season before relegation in 1960-61 this season), but this performance would probably not have been possible without investing a local butcher, Bob Lord. Another controversial figure that banned official trailer groups because he believed that he was taking power, as well as journalists who questioned him, still has a stand that was named at Turf Moor, although he made anti -Semitic comments in 1974 when he still headed the club.

The presence of characters such as Soudell and Lord reminds us that Preston against Burnley is the ultimate heritage, it is not necessarily the most innocent.

(Top photo: Alex Dodd – Camerasport via Getty Images)