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Mark Burke played for Middlesbrough during a pivotal period in the club’s history. The 50-year-old Brummie joined Boro from Aston Villa in December 1987, less than 18 months after the club’s liquidation crisis. He was a raw but talented 18-year-old attacking midfielder who experienced good times and bad in three-and-a-half eventful years on Teesside under Bruce Rioch and Colin Todd’s management. Now, among other responsibilities, Burke’s a scout for Middlesbrough and certainly has an interesting story to tell. In an exclusive interview with Philip Tallentire, he looks back over his career and, in particular, his time with Boro.

Philip Tallentire: What do you remember of your early days as a schoolboy footballer?

Mark Burke: “I’ve played football since I can remember, to be honest. When I was about eight I joined the first team of my local club. In those days you couldn’t play until you were 10 but I played when I was younger.

“When I was 10 I got spotted by Villa, they took me down there. In those days you went down in the holidays and you would go down once or twice a week. I was playing for the school team, the Sunday team, the district and the county and all that.

“Then, when I was 14, I signed schoolboy forms for Villa and at 15 I played for England Schoolboys at the time when the England Schoolboys game was a big deal. There were only a couple of live games on telly in those days and that was one of them.

“It was a big game and in the televised game I scored a hat-trick at Wembley against Holland (England won 4-1 in June 1984) so that was a real highlight. And I also played against Scotland at Wembley and we won 1-0 and I scored the goal and then we went to Scotland we beat them 1-0 and I scored again! So they were really good memories.”

PT: Playing at Wembley for England as a 15-year-old must have been a huge thrill?

MB: “I personally think Wembley is different now, it’s lost its specialness, everybody plays there now but that wasn’t always the case.

“I’ve got a good friend who used to play for Villa called Gary Shaw who’s one of Villa’s best ever players and he was never lucky enough to play at Wembley.

“He won the European Cup, won the league and when they played in the Charity Shield he was injured.

“So I always joke with him that I played at Wembley and he didn’t. But in those days it was a massive deal to play at Wembley so it’s still one of my best memories.

“To say you played there when it was such an iconic stadium is just amazing. I think now it’s just another big stadium really.”

PT: Who were your mentors as a young player?

MB: “Brian Little was brilliant, everybody at Villa loved Brian, he’s just such a fantastic man first of all, everybody loved him and wanted to do their best for him, and he was also a great coach as well.

“He kept things simple, you knew what he wanted and you didn’t want to let him down. He was a great influence and I think anybody who worked with him would say that. He was instrumental in bringing me to Middlesbrough.”

PT: It must have been exciting to join a club like Aston Villa?

MB: “I joined Villa from school when I was 16, I signed an apprenticeship in 1985. Villa had won the European Cup in 1982 and was still a massive club but it was in a bit of a bad way, there were a lot of changes going on, the chairman was getting rid of a lot of players.

“It was a really turbulent time when I joined Villa. I signed a pro deal when I was 18 and made my debut a couple of months later against Everton (April 1987), who won the league that year with that great team.

“Then Graham Taylor came in and changed everything around, just went through the club with a real big brush and just swept everything away, he did things his way. He sold me to Middlesbrough in December 87.”

PT: How did your move to Middlesbrough come about?

MB: “Bruce Rioch signed me. Bruce had really big ties with Villa and he’d been a star player there and he was always keeping an eye on Villa.

“I think he still had a house in the Midlands and would watch reserve games at Villa.

“Brian Little was my youth coach at Villa and I think Brian mentioned me to him.

“He’d already bought Paul Kerr, Dean Glover and Kevin Poole so when I signed he had four ex-Villa lads up there with the young lads Boro had like Gary Pallister, Tony Mowbray, Gary Parkinson, Colin Cooper, Stuart Ripley; all those lads so it was a really good mix.

“I went there when Middlesbrough were in the second division, they’d got promotion from the third the previous season and I joined just before Christmas and we got promoted through the play-offs.”

PT: Was it a tough transition to leave your hometown and settle in the North-east?

MB: “I was only 18 when I went to Boro and it was difficult at first. In those days there were no mobiles, no internet so it was difficult.

“I stayed at the Stork Hotel in Bowesfieled Lane Stockton, which isn’t there any more, and John and Eleanor, who ran the place they looked after me brilliantly.

“I was in there with Trevor Senior and Ashley Fothergill we had a good time to be honest, it was a great place to be and some great people came in.

“We had a lot of the police come in there to use the bar as regular visitors, very close knit and they were great people - Woody, Ken Dixon, Mike Simpson, I wonder what happened to them? It was a bit like the programme Life on Mars!

“At that time it was a very family-focused club and everyone was a Boro fan so it was like a big family really.”

PT: It must have helped to have familiar faces from Villa in the Boro dressing room?

MB: “I’d known them since I was really young so to walk into a dressing room when you are really young and see a few faces that you know is always going to help.

“But the lads at Middlesbrough were brilliant, it was just a brilliant group of lads. I was homesick at first but they were a great bunch of lads and it was just a special time.”

PT: Who were the big characters in the Boro squad?

MB: “They all had their own specialities. Gary Gill, Parky, Mogga, Coops, Pally, Gary Hamilton, they were all great lads.

“It was a totally different sense of humour, which you had to get used to. There’s banter at all clubs but at Boro it was totally different to Villa.

“At Villa, for example, it was just non-stop everybody taking the p**s. It was never about your game, how you played, it was about your clothes or you hair – anything you could take the p**s out of you, you would.

“But at Middlesbrough it was really direct and they would talk about how you were playing! I was, like, ‘hang on’. At Villa nobody did that, it just wasn’t done.

“But since then I’ve been all over the world and it’s different everywhere you go. Not better or worse, just different.”

PT: What were your first impressions of Teesside?

MB: “I drove up - my uncle and my mum drove me up - and I remember my first impressions of the club and how different it was to Villa.

“It was really a more family-friendly club and it was a real eye-opener for me. Villa was by then a totally different club to Middlesbrough, who had nearly gone under.

“They were down to the bare bones so to do what Bruce did to get them up and then up again was just amazing, it couldn’t be done today.”

PT: You were playing senior football at a young age weren’t you?

MB: “Football was different then. When I was at Villa playing in the reserves, playing for the reserves then you were playing against first team players, internationals.

“At Villa, the Intermediate League was open age so if we played Forest, Derby or Leicester, you played the players who weren’t in the first team so you could end up playing against eight first team players including internationals. Sometimes you didn’t get a kick but it was how you learned.

“Nowadays the kids are playing youth team football or playing for the under-23s, they are playing against their own age group. There comes a point where that becomes useless, it’s pointless. You’ve got to play against proper players who know what they are doing otherwise you don’t improve.”

PT: What do you remember about Boro’s 1988 FA Cup marathon against champions Everton (Boro drew 1-1 away, 2-2 at home in the first replay and lost 2-1 away in the second replay)?

MB: “I just remember that was such an exciting time because Everton were one of the top teams in the country, they had such a fantastic team and to take them to a couple of replays was so exciting.

“The whole time when I was up at Middlesbrough, the first two years, was just really exciting because there was always something going on and the whole town was behind the team.

“For that young team to be playing against such a group of players as Everton at that time and to match them over three games was just incredible.”

PT: Crowds could be brutal back then, did you suffer abuse from the terraces?

MB: “No, I just got the usual, just the usual stuff everybody got. I was a fan, I’d been to loads of Villa-Blues games and got chased down the road, it was part of football then. But as far as stick goes I didn’t get any more stick than anybody else.

“I was a Villa fan, I was at Highbury when we won the league (1981). Villa lost to Arsenal but we won the league that day because Ipswich lost up at Boro, Bosco Jankovic scored! I was in Rotterdam when we won the European Cup (1982) so I was a big Villa fan.”

PT: Boro had the chance to go up automatically in 1988 but slipped up at home to Leicester, losing 2-1. What do you remember about that day?

MB: “That’s a day I do remember a lot about because it was a massive game. I think we only needed to draw to go up and everybody was so wound up for it.

“I remember me and Trevor Senior went out for something to eat a few days before and we were sat somewhere and people were coming up saying ‘we’re going to do it’, and ‘we’re going to have a big party’. And I remember Trevor saying to me, ‘I don’t like this, everybody is too confident about it’.

“I think people thought we’d just turn up and win but we froze on the day to be honest. Leicester had a good team as well, and we froze. We came back late, Bernie got one and I think I had half a chance but we froze. We were a young team and it was a big day.”

PT: What about the play-offs and Boro’s promotion-clinching aggregate victory over Chelsea?

MB: “The Chelsea game was just... I remember sitting on the bus going down the King’s Road and all their fans were outside the pubs and we were thinking, ‘bloody hell’. It was really hot and a crazy, crazy atmosphere and I remember after the game bottles were thrown at us and we had to run off the pitch, it was just incredible.

“I remember on the way back the coach just stopped outside a fish and chip shop. We were all stood by the side of the bus eating fish and chips which is what you did after every game then so there was no reason to change. It was in Kilburn, somewhere like that, and then it was back home and we all went out to the Mall. Different times.

“I remember when we lost to Leicester, Bruce said to us, ‘look, I think we can go up, I fancy us to go up and I want to put a bet on and I want everybody to put £100 in’. I think we were 10/1 to go up. Then we after we beat Chelsea we went to America on a trip and we were driving into London, up the hill into Harrow and I remember Bruce walking down the bus throwing out these envelopes full of money so that was nice!”

PT: How did you get on with Bruce?

MB: “It was a bit love and hate sort of thing really. He was a brilliant manager to be honest. When him and Colin Todd played, they were world class players.

“Bruce was a brilliant manager, there’s no doubt about that. He probably looks back now and thinks some of the things he did were a bit harsh but that’s how he did things. I think everybody would change some of the things they did and said in the past.

“He could be very temperamental, you didn’t know how to take him at times but I suppose that was part of his character and part of what made him tick because everybody was unbelievably respectful.”

PT: You only a teenager when you went to Boro, was your age taken into account?

MB: “All the lads were young and when you are older you look at things a different way. At the time all I ever wanted from him was just to say, ‘Well done’, but he wasn’t like that’. I suppose that’s what made him the success he was and that won’t work at other clubs.

“But I didn’t have a problem with that. As a manager you don’t have time to be messing about with this, that and the other, you’ve got to get on with winning games. It was a hard school but that’s how football was then, it was a totally different world.”

PT: Who were your best mates at Boro?

MB: “I used to knock about with Dean Glover and some of the ex-Villa lads like Paul Kerr and Kevin Poole, but I got on with all the lads. I still get on with Gilly, Gary Gill, I do some scouting for Middlesbrough so I speak to Gilly all the time, I’m still in touch with him. They were all good lads, there wasn’t one bad lad. I can’t say anything bad about any of those players at Boro.”

PT: Was it a special time in your career?

MB: “It was a special time because of what had happened. The club had nearly gone under and it was a very tight-knit group of players and I class Bernie and Hammy as Boro lads and you had your Villa lads but everybody was together, there wasn’t a divide. And all the town was behind us, everywhere you went everybody was behind the team.

“It’s not like that now because the world has changed and football has changed. Ayresome Park was where it was and you could just walk into town and it was just really, really special and the feeling for the club and the players was everywhere so it was a really special time.”

PT: What do you remember about playing at Ayresome Park?

MB: “It was a great ground, a proper football ground, it was atmospheric, especially when it was full. It had a great pitch and I remember Bruce would always make sure it was watered before each match. Boro have got the Riverside now which is a totally different arena and but Ayresome Park was a special place. I can understand why they left but it was a special place.”

PT: There wasn’t the huge financial gulf between players and supporters in those days was there?

MB: “It wasn’t as big, in fact it was very small to be honest. We just happened to be doing what the fans wanted to do but were earning a bit more. We went to the same places they went to, what else are you going to do? We were just normal people.

“We were earning good money at the time but not what it is today. The gap now is just ridiculous. I don’t have problems with what the players earn today. I hear stories from people at certain clubs that it’s a bit of a cage for players now because they can’t do anything any more because everybody has got a phone. They can’t go to the pub, they can’t even get petrol without somebody taking pictures. In those days you were free to do what you wanted and I liked that.”

PT: In that Division One season you played against the top clubs like Manchester United, Tottenham and Liverpool at the age of 19, were you living the dream?

MB: “When I was a kid all I wanted to do was play at the big grounds against the big teams and that’s what we were doing so it was a great time. I think the only time we were in the bottom three was the day we went down.

“We did well but made a few mistakes because we were a young team. With a bit more luck we would have stayed up. But it was a great time and we showed we could play against the best.

“I scored four or five goals and I thought I did well. You had some great players and the Liverpool team with John Barnes were special but the one performance that stood out for me was Chris Waddle for Tottenham at Ayresome Park (January 89). He was an incredible player, I remember he gave Coops a really, really hard time and Coops was a really good player. Waddle was brilliant and that was probably the stand-out performance that season.”

PT: What was your best Boro goal and favourite performance for the club?

MB: “The goal at Southampton when we played away at The Dell (Jan 89). When I’m in Birmingham I play squash with Chris Nichol, who was the manager of Southampton at the time, and we have a laugh about that.

“In terms of performance, the Millwall game at home (Oct 88), I think we were the first team to beat Millwall that season and we beat them at home and I played really well in that one.

“But I think it was just the whole experience really, being there when we got promoted, it was just a really special time that will never happen again.

“I always say there a three periods of Middlesbrough’s history recently that have been special times. There was the one with Bruce, then you had the time when a big name like Bryan Robson came and brought in the players he signed which was amazing for the club and then you had Steve McClaren going to a European final. So there were three periods and I was lucky that I played in one of them. It was a great time.”

PT: When Boro were relegated from Division One, you didn’t feature very often the following season, why was that?

MB: “That was probably the greatest disappointment to be honest. I thought, ‘all right we’ve gone down but I want to play a massive part in getting us straight back up’. I remember in the summer I went away, I was only 20 and still very, very thin, I hadn’t filled out at all so that summer I went away and got beefed up and I was so fit it was unbelievable.

“But in those days you didn’t have body fat measurements so when I went back for pre-season training I’d put nearly a stone on. It was pure muscle and I was really flying. Bruce just looked at my weight and said I was overweight but I wasn’t. I had a massive argument with him about that and I was flying in pre-season, I was scoring goals but he just wouldn’t have it. That was probably the biggest disappointment because I think I could have done really well.”

PT: Was it a shock when Rioch was sacked by Boro in March 1990?

MB: “It was shock because it was Bruce, because of who he was. But it was coming. I remember one game at Blackburn (Nov 89), I was on the bench and he was so nervous and I’d never seen him like that it was strange. I thought, ‘what’s going on’. Kerny (Alan Kernaghan) scored a hat-trick that game and it gave him a reprieve but I remember that was the first sign.”

PT: How did you get on with Colin Todd, who replaced Rioch?

MB: “We didn’t get at all to be honest but those things happen. When Bruce left I thought I’d get another chance and then when Toddy took over I thought, ‘that’s the end of that’. He said he’d give me a chance but he didn’t give me a chance at all. I remember having a big argument with him about that. I just remember telling him I wanted to leave and I went to Wolves and he then got the sack. So I thought if I hadn’t gone it might have been different because when Toddy left Lennie Lawrence came in. I wish I’d stayed.”

PT: You handed in several transfer requests didn’t you?

MB: “Yes. The first one was funny because I rang the PFA and said I wanted to leave the club and they told me to write a letter and what to say. So I took the letter in to Bruce at Maiden Castle and he was sat in his chair with his feet up and I was standing there and he read it, looked at me, read it again, and ripped it up and said, ‘Get out’. I said, ‘All right then’, and left!’ So I just went out, started laughing and carried on.

“I remember going in to see Bruce to negotiate my contract. If you want another £50 or whatever you did it yourself. I remember saying at the time, ‘I can’t negotiate with a 45-year-old bloke who’s been in football all his life, I’m 18’. And, in those days, you’d be arguing about that in the morning and then half an hour later you’d go out training and Bruce is joining in with the training. I said, ‘Players need to have agents just for that sort of thing’. But it’s probably gone too far the other way now.”

PT: You weren’t in the team by then but what do you remember about the ZDS final against Chelsea at Wembley?

MB: “I went down with the team. Mogga didn’t play because he’d had an operation so I remember him and me going to Wembley in the morning with the kit man to put the kit out. We were walking on the pitch at 8’o’clock in the morning.”

PT: It must have been tough playing for the reserves?

MB: “That was really difficult when you’d played in the first team a lot. You’d have ups and downs and you have funny situations where if you’re playing and you’re a bit down you don’t play very well and people say, ‘Oh, that’s why he’s not in the first team’. And if you are playing well, which I did in the second team lots of times and scored loads of goals, they go, ‘Why isn’t he in the first team, there must be something wrong with him’. So you couldn’t really win.”

PT: Why did you go on loan to Darlington in the autumn of 1990?

MB: “I’d had a big argument with Toddy because Sheffield United came in for me and he wanted me to go out on loan and Dave Bassett was the manager. Toddy said, ‘You’ve got to speak to him’. I said, ‘I don’t want to go to Sheffield United’, and we had a big argument.

“So I rang Dave Bassett and said, ‘Look Dave I don’t think it’s the right move for me, I don’t think the style of football will suit me,’ and he said, ‘All right, fair enough, no problem’. But Toddy was really annoyed because he wanted to get me out but I wasn’t going somewhere just because he said so.

“The Darlington move came through Brian Little. I’d spoken to Brian and he asked me if I wanted to go to Darlington and I said, ‘Yes, definitely’. I just wanted to play. If it had been anyone else but Brian I probably wouldn’t have gone.”

PT: It was a big step down to go from second tier to fourth tier, wasn’t it?

MB: “It was totally different but it was only going to be for a month. I just wanted to play and because I loved Brian I said I’d go. At the end of the month Brian asked me if I’d consider signing but I said no so he said it would be best if I went back to Boro. It was just another world but Gary Gill was there at the time which was helpful.”

PT: You eventually joined Wolves, how did that move come about?

MB: “Graham Turner, the Wolves boss, was Aston Villa’s manager when I signed for them as a kid, so he knew me from then. Wolves were in the second division at the time, they are a massive club, a really big club and, not that I was really bothered about it at the time, it was back in the Midlands, and I knew the manager so I thought, ‘fair enough’.

“Even going to Wolves was a big shock because it was a real, ramshackle club at the time. The pitch was about 400 miles away from the stands and the changing areas were an absolute mess in the old stand and all that, it was a real shock. And the way they play football as well was totally different, that was a massive shock as well. You had Bully (Steve Bull) up front and it was long ball stuff so it took a lot of getting used to.”

PT: Was it a wrench to leave Boro?

MB: “It was tough because I really liked it there, I lived in Yarm, I loved the club and really liked the people, it was a great place to live so it was a shame. But you haven’t got time to think about that when you’re playing football, you’ve just got to get on with it.”

PT: Did you play in Boro’s promotion winning game at Molineux for Wolves (May 92)?

MB: “I was man of the match that day and we should have beaten Middlesbrough, who had a player who was sent off. It was strange to play them but I wanted to beat them, I wanted to stop them going up, that’s how you are in football, we were trying to win the game and we should have won.”

PT: Biogs of your career reveal your nickname was Sooty. That does jump out as a sign that the times and standards were different then doesn’t it?

MB: “You wouldn’t have a nickname like that now but the world’s changed, everything has changed. That was sort of, I would say, an affectionate nickname, if you like. There was never any sort of anything (abuse) when I was at Middlesbrough, nothing at all.

“You wouldn’t be allowed to do that now but I think a lot things – it’s a big conversation to have, there are a lot of nuances, there’s a whole debate about what is racist and what isn’t racist for me anyway. Nowadays you only have to look at somebody the wrong way and it’s racist.

“In a football club, especially lads, if you are in a group of lads they try to take the p**s out of anything. So if you’ve got a big head, big ears, a big nose, or your shoes are cr*p or your jeans are cr*p, or you are ginger, or you’re Chinese, or you’re black, or you’re pale, whatever it is, that’s what you get it for. And in football changing rooms it’s that times one hundred. It’s absolutely ruthless and it’s non-stop.

“But you take that out into society now, society has changed and become so ridiculously soft because nobody can say anything to anybody.

“Everybody knows there’s a certain line, everybody knows where the line is, everybody has got common sense, you know what you can say and what you can’t say. Nowadays you can’t say anything so it’s gone too far now.

“Racism is a different thing. When you are stopping people doing things, preventing them progressing in life because of their colour or their religion, that’s different. But just saying something to someone, I don’t class that as racism.”

PT: You left England to play abroad, starting in Holland in 1995, that must have been interesting?

MB: “It was brilliant, it was a great experience. I went to Fortuna Sittard in the Eredivisie and we had a really good team, we had Marco van Bommel, Fernando Ricksen and Patrick Paauwe. It was a great time playing against the Ajax team of 1995 which was the best team in the world at the time, they had Edgar Davids, Frank de Boer, Patrick Kluivert, Jari Litmanen and PSV had Ronaldo and Ruud van Nistelrooy and Feyenoord had Henrick Larsson so the level was unbelievable and it was a great time to be there.”

PT: Did the Dutch style of football suit your game?

MB: “Yes it was totally different. The things I’d been saying they should be doing in England, they were doing in Holland so I thought I wasn’t mad after all!

“It was a great experience, we had a great coach in Pim Verbeek who went on to coach the Australian national team, South Korea and others , and he’s a close friend of mine.”

PT: From Holland you went to Japan which must have been a real culture shock?

MB: “I always wanted to go to Japan, in fact I almost went when I was at Wolves but that fell through.

“When I went there the team was in J-League 2, the Japanese second division, so my coach (Verbeek) took to Japan to play for a team called Omiga Ardija based just outside Tokyo. It was a real culture shock but an amazing place, an absolutely amazing place. Brilliant organisation, brilliant people, I had a fabulous time.”

PT: What about your time with Rapid Bucharest in Romania?

MB: “It was a crazy place but a really, really interesting place. I’d advise anybody to go for a weekend in Bucharest, it’s a really, really interesting place. I was only there for six months and I got tired of it then, there was so much going on apart from football. I could write a book about it!”

PT: Do experiences like that give you a new perspective on life?

MB: “I’ve played in those places and I’ve visited lots of other places and you see what life is like for the majority of people. When you’ve been to those places and you come back and you see what people are moaning about here... Poverty in England is if you haven’t got a plasma telly or whatever, but when you’ve seen real poverty in places like Bucharest where you’ve got kids with no legs in the streets, that is real poverty. There’s nothing to moan about in this country. It really does change your world view.”

PT: How did you spot Christian Burgess, who’s now with Portsmouth?

MB: “A friend of a friend was coaching at Birmingham University and wanted some help so I went along for a season at it was really good. That’s when I saw Christian. All the players there had been at clubs as kids but got released and had packed it in. I said to Tom Brady, who was the manager, ‘These lads are better than some of the kids I see in the Academies’.

“So I said to Middlesbrough, ‘There’s a kid here, Christian, take him for two or three of days and let me know what you think of him because I know what I think’. And they signed him straight away so that was nice. He’s a good player and a good lad.”

PT: What are you doing at the moment Mark?

MB: “I’m doing some scouting for Middlesbrough and I’m doing some stuff in property so I’m down in London quite a lot. I’m backwards and forwards to Holland because my son, Marcos, is in Holland.

“He’s playing for his local team near Sittard. My partner, who’s Dutch, and myself have been together for 20 years now and they live over there so I’m back and forward every few weeks.”