By Alastair Campbell December 28 2009 That hurt. It really did. And so now another long journey home from an away defeat pondering too many "what if" kind of questions.
The biggest what if concerns our left back Stephen Jordan. What if he hadn't been booked in the first half? Yeah, well he was, so more importantly, what if he had remembered he had been booked in the first half by the time we got into the second half?
That would have helped.
Because biased though I am, and prone as I am to seeing no wrong in anything a Burnley player does while playing for Burnley, Jordan's second yellow card was not so much a shirt tug as an attempt at whole shirt removal. The tug was already well underway when we were shouting at him to stop it in case referee Howard Webb, who was far nearer the scene of the crime, saw what was going on. Webb doesn't miss much (though don't say that to Everton fans who might have seen a first-half Burnley handball in the Burnley box - I certainly did) and he couldn't miss Jordan's tussle.
I was a long way away from Owen Coyle and assistant manager Sandy Stewart as Jordan trudged by them and down the tunnel, but I could still feel the heat. There are times when a manager must feel badly let down.
The point is that there was no need to commit the foul. Even if Jordan had been beaten we had men back. It was not as if he was shutting down a certain scoring chance. So from "what if" we go to "why" and I can only assume that for some reason it slipped his mind that he was already on a yellow.
It had at times been hard enough to hold on with 11 v 11 let alone 11 v 10, though to be fair to the ten, they withstood phenomenal pressure and at times looked more likely to score. But once the dam broke, and substitute James Vaughan fired Everton into the lead, we knew it was going to be hard to get anything out of the game.
So we're back to more what ifs. What if David Nugent's shot had been one inch to the left of where he shot it? Then it would have hit the inside of the post, not the middle of it, and gone in. What if Chris Eagles had continued the fantastic box-to-box run which saw him turn successive Everton defenders inside out, rather than let Kevin McDonald take the final shot and put it over the bar? What if Webb had not booked Jordan in the first half? Sorry, am I repeating myself.
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