Wes Burns, Outside the Box

In July 2000, as a 16-year-old, I wrote to the website Football365 to contest their pre-season prediction that recent play-off winners Ipswich Town would finish bottom of the Premiership. In an abusive, expletive-ridden, borderline-actionable rant, I explained there was no chance of the mighty Super Blues getting relegated. In David Johnson, Marcus Stewart, Martijn Reuser and James Scowcroft we had the firepower, in Matt Holland, Jim Magilton and Jermaine Wright the control and in Jamie Clapham, Mark Venus, John McGreal, Fabian Wilnis and Richard Wright we had the defence, all enough to take the league by storm.

My extremely indelicate remarks reflect a couple of things about teenage football fans, one positive, one negative. The negative is that, even when they’re correct, they’re often extremely unpleasant, especially when put in control of a keyboard. The positive is that kids are often less willing than adult fans to put players into boxes. As we get older, more experienced, more cynical, we tend to form more jaded opinions on players’ career trajectories. That millennium Ipswich team didn’t have a lot of pedigree, almost all of them were well into peak footballer age without ever seeing significant action in the English top-flight. Venus was 33, Wilnis 29, McGreal, 28, Stewart, 27, Reuser, Jermaine Wright and Holland, 25. Only Clapham, Scowcroft (24) and Richard Wright were really of an age where you might assume there was more to come, only Magilton had a lot of elite football under his belt already. Many of them had spent much of their careers in lower divisions than the English second tier. It was perfectly rational to assume that they had likely gone as far as they could by winning promotion and a swift return was more than likely.

None of them fit easily into that solid lower league professional box though. John McGreal was a far more technical and composed defender than anyone could expect of someone with 233 appearances for Tranmere Rovers, Mark Venus was far more cultured than anyone with that much Division Four football really has the right to be. Then there was Marcus. On the eve of the 2000-2001 Premier League season the majority of Marcus Stewart’s league goals were still with Bristol Rovers in the third tier. Even if it took him until the latter stages of his twenties to get there, Marcus Stewart certainly wasn’t a third-tier striker. My teenage self, less ravaged by experience, knew not to put these guys simplistically into a box and didn’t imagine that your career to date determined your ceiling as a player.

Older me is, unfortunately, a bit more willing to categorise and sort, to anticipate career trajectories and see hurdles that simply aren’t usually surmounted. If you get to 21 and you haven’t made the first team, you probably won’t. If you’re playing in League One at 25, there’s probably a reason. If you’ve got to 28 the room to develop your game probably isn’t there. Lower League Journeyman, Ageing Pro Past His Prime, Former Wonderkid, Athletic But Not Technically Up To The Higher Divisions, boxes, boxes, boxes.

And I think I put Wes Burns in a box. I think I clocked his age when he signed (26), the seasons at Forest Green, Oxford, Cheltenham and Fleetwood and I thought about ceilings and where you get to from a career that keeps you in the bottom two tiers of the EFL ultimately until after your 28th birthday and I put him in a box. The Useful Player Whilst We’re in League One box. I watched him become the key player for the cleverest coach in the EFL. Watched as the physical gift that most captured your attention when he arrived (pace) was gradually eclipsed by his technical ability and then still further eclipsed by his tactical acumen.  I appreciated his contributions. I appreciated him, a buzzy presence at the club with a daft sense of humour and a glamourous hairdo. In League One, he scored and assisted in a variety of different ways, he stretched teams with clever, impeccably timed runs, he diligently ran the entire right flank, he played game after game in a relentless, punishing season, a consummate team-mate as well as an individual star.

Even after all that, I still think I had him in a box. He was the star of the third tier whose athletic ability would be less unusual a league up, leaving his lesser technical ability exposed. I thought he’d contribute in the Championship, but I assumed we’d look to upgrade. We’d find a Premier League starlet and Burns would be the 70-minute relief player, who we’d value for his versatility, effort and his ability to get up and down the pitch. If I’m honest with myself, maybe I still thought that when he went down injured for Wales last month, imagining that Omari Hutchinson would take his place and never look back.   

But some players don’t belong in boxes and glass ceilings between divisions are easier to shatter than we sometimes imagine. Football careers are strange things, players take meandering routes to the top, they discover new facets to their game later in their careers, they find roles that fit them, they find coaches who know how to unlock something special that takes their game to a whole other level. Sometimes an elite level player was lurking in there the whole time.

Wes Burns now looks like he’s growing week by week in the Championship, learning what to do with different kinds of full backs at this level and how to deal with different challenges. His direct goal contributions thus far haven’t reflected his true importance to the team (suspect that’ll change shortly). So often it is Wes who throws the other team’s shape into chaos and makes their high line precarious or their back three too narrow.

The audacious, outrageous goal on Saturday, the best I have seen in more than twenty-five years going to Portman Road, was just the icing on the cake for a player who has been perhaps the key element of McKenna’s team shape over the past two years and he continues to be one of the most vital cogs in our tactical system. Who knows how far he could go from here.

A series of glass ceilings shattered. Wes Burns shows I had at least a little wisdom as teenager. You can tell a bit about where a player can go from where they’ve been, but it isn’t destiny. There was nothing that dictated the 2000 Ipswich Town squad couldn’t make the step up to the top division, we’d all seen what they could do that season. I was right to believe in those guys, right not to put them in a box. There’s no reason why we shouldn’t show the same belief in Wes Burns.

Wes Burns v Coventry City

Minutes 65

Goals 1

Total shots 2

Accurate passes 18/19 (95%)

Expected goals (xG) 0.06

Expected goals on target (xGOT) 0.76

Expected assists 0.10

Shot accuracy 1/2 (50%)

Trivela shot accuracy 1/1 (100%)

Touches 30

Touches in opposition box 3

Successful dribbles 0/2 (0%)

Accurate crosses 0/3 (0%)

Recoveries 5

Dribbled past 1

Ground duels won 1/4 (25%)

Aerial duels won 1/1 (100%)

Fouled 1