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Burnley got off to the worst possible start when McAnuff struck inside the opening minute.
Watford will meet Leeds in the Championship play-off final after cruising past a lacklustre Palace.
BSAD reports: There is an air of something approaching hysteria inside Vicarage Road.
Immense. Amazing. Rock solid. Tense. Iron-willed. Undefeated. Just some of the words we used, once we’d calmed down, to describe the fight on the touchline which was triggered by maybe a little too much management of the game and, in particular, the ball. But if we focus on that, we’ll be overlooking a job done with just as many of the qualities as we brought to the 60th-minute melee.
So, much as I enjoyed watching our highly impressive, rousing start to the campaign, this, for me, is Adrian Boothroyd’s first landmark of genuine note. The nature of the man, it appears, is such that he wouldn’t greet it with more than a passing shrug and a sharp quip, but it is an achievement nevertheless. Because the consolidation is much more significant than the initial conquest: we might very easily have slipped back into mid-table by now, looking back upon those late summer days as a glorious, short-lived memory. Instead, we’re still here, claiming the right to consider ourselves contenders. That’s a bloody triumph, to my mind.