Well, this sucks. For those of you who don’t read the Burnley stuff, you can scroll past it. You have our permission. This is a Burnley mourning space primarily, though. It’s like when you have to pull over to let a funeral procession pass on its way to the cemetery.
Sean Dyche: Sacked
Burnley fired Sean Dyche this morning. It was, and is, shocking.
Dyche had just signed a contract extension at the beginning of this season, and with the club under new ownership, there was hope that Dyche’s ability to survive in the Premier League with a thin payroll would translate well to Dyche competing in the middle reaches of the Premier League with a slightly larger payroll. We’ll never know. After ten years, Burnley is changing managers.
Dyche’s time at Burnley was, and will always be, remarkable. He brought Burnley up from the Championship at the end of 2014, then brought the club back up after immediate relegation the following year. He shockingly took Burnley to European Play, finishing seventh in the table in the 2017-18 season and gaining admission to the Europa League (the crown jewel of sports east of the Atlantic Ocean). We’re rather new to Burnley, here at The Barking Crow, but our impression is that there was always a sense of wonder at how well Dyche had Burnley doing, and with him gone, things have transitioned to a state of fear.
The best explanation we can surmise is that with eight matches left and Burnley at major risk of relegation, the club’s leadership thought a Hail Mary necessary, so they went deep. We’d guess this isn’t a move geared at Burnley being as good as possible next year, or over the next five years. We’d guess it’s a move aimed at trying to shake things up enough to rattle off a few upset wins, pass Everton or Leeds, survive relegation for another season, and then regroup. Relegation is an existential threat to some extent, because if Burnley does fall back to the Championship, there’s no guarantee they’ll ever return. That’s the thing about relegation. Sometimes, a lot of times, even, teams don’t come back. It makes soccer a ton of fun outside of the redistributive United States. It also makes it gut-wrenching at times, and now, for Burnley, is one of those times.
It’s sad, too, because Sean Dyche was a beloved figure. As with any coach, there were complaints about strategy and personnel decisions, but by and large, Dyche was beloved, and there was a reason he was the longest-tenured manager at any Premier League club. The U-23 coach, Mike Jackson, will take charge in the immediate term, with injured captain Ben Mee, academy director Paul Jenkins, and U-23 goalkeeping coach Connor King his assistants. Dyche’s assistants were fired as well. It’s a moment of intense transition. It really is a Hail Mary.
We’ll see if it works. The Burnleys are big underdogs Sunday morning (9:15 AM EDT, Peacock Premium) down at West Ham. Everton and Leeds are idle. We aren’t taking Watford and Norwich likely, but if Watford and Norwich are ahead of Burnley, the lights are out anyway.
I will say: I love that “sacked” is the verb they use for firing in Britain. That’s a great word.
Joe Kelly: Same Story
We got a Joe Kelly update (via Vinnie Duber) and it sounds like the timeline is still the same, or perhaps a little bit later. Might go out on a rehab assignment before the end of April, which would imply returning around the end of April or the beginning of May. Can the White Sox hang around the playoff race until then? That’s the question eating at every south side heart.
Mason Ramsey: Why the Photo Shoot?
Is Mason Ramsey planning something? He posted a few pictures from an evident photo shoot yesterday on Instagram. We can only hope the song of the summer’s on its way.
NASCAR Gets Dirty (Again)
The NASCAR Dirt Race is this weekend at Bristol. Weekend schedule as follows:
Last year went better than expected (i.e., the cars did not just get stuck in the dirt and turn it into an embarrassing mess), and though there’s some rain in the forecast tomorrow morning, it should move out in time to be a fine few days of racing. The race is so new that it’s hard to know exactly what to expect, but the big storyline regarding the racing itself is that they couldn’t figure out a safe way to replace the windshields with mesh, which could translate to more restart issues due to poor visibility like there were last year. Like many of us, NASCAR likes to figure things out as it goes.
The format of the race is different than most weekends, with heats on Saturday determining the starting order, in a nod to dirt track formats everywhere. It’ll still be a full Cup race, but Saturday night should be fairly fun, even if guys’ll be careful to not destroy their cars.
Eugene Melnyk, Tim Stützle
I did read the piece in The Athletic about Eugene Melnyk, and if you’re interested and you’re up for paying a dollar or you have a subscription already, here’s the link. The parts that jumped out to me were…
- Melnyk treated season ticket holders and the like to a free concert by the Eagles in 2003. This was probably the first bad sign. I don’t care how you actually feel about the Eagles. If Jeffrey Lebowski doesn’t like them, they’re no friend of mine.
- The story of Melnyk probably-drunkenly telling the team in 2007, after they lost to the Ducks, that he’d get them Stanley Cup rings the size of beavers when they won it, and then switching to deer, and then switching to moose—I don’t know how to end that sentence grammatically correctly but that sounds like a ride of a speech. Imagine going through the most heartbreaking defeat of your life and there’s this drunk wild man in the locker room yelling at you about hypothetical future seasons and he doesn’t go straight from beaver-sized rings to moose-sized rings? Everything in the speech story makes sense except the deer thing.
- The “Dogs and Gays” line deserves some unlicensed merchandise, but I’m too far from the Sens to make it with confidence I’m not misreading something.
Overall, it sounds like Melnyk was a wild card who engaged in at least two horrible instances of misogynistic verbal abuse and crafted a disastrous culture within the Senators’ organization, which isn’t exactly surprising but is still awkward to talk about this quickly after his death, especially with so many people pointing to the better aspects of the man. It seems there’s a lot of things about Eugene Melnyk’s life that Sens folks are struggling to square.
On the ice, the Senators Sens’d the Bruins last night, coming back from two goals down as Tim Stützle made the city of Boston his son, scoring once and assisting on two other goals in a thriller. Helmet video here. Sens play tomorrow at home against Toronto (7:00 PM EDT, NHL Network) as they try to continue their trolling of the NHL.
Links
Finally, we’ve got Bangers III second round results (Round of 16 voting on Monday), Fargo kissed a baby, we talked about grilled cheese sandwiches and parmesan and fire, and a guy in our apartment building looks like Brock Holt.
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Weekend viewing schedule, italics for the muted screen, remember that today’s baseball is Jackie Robinson Day which is always cool (I should really read more about Jackie Robinson—got the history they give kids and then didn’t really follow up on it):
Friday
- 8:10 PM EDT – Cubs @ Rockies (Regional TV)
Saturday
- 6:00 PM EDT – NASCAR Cup Series heat races (FS2)
- 7:00 PM EDT – Sens. vs. Leafs (NHL Network)
- 8:10 PM EDT – Cubs @ Rockies (Regional TV)
Sunday
- 9:15 AM EDT – Burnley @ West Ham (Peacock)
- 3:10 PM EDT – Cubs @ Rockies (Regional TV)
- 7:00 PM EDT – NASCAR Cup Series Food City Dirt Race (FOX)
