Ashley Barnes and Chris Wood have resoundingly failed an impromptu test.
It seemed reasonable to establish whether their mutual understanding in the penalty box extends to matters off the pitch.
For example, do they know each other’s favourite musician?
Wood does not have the foggiest, while Barnes cites one of his own favourites — Celine Dion — in blind hope that it will tally with Wood’s. Not so. The Burnley No 9’s tastes are eclectic — ‘Kings of Leon, Dean Martin, Frank Sinatra, everything really’.
Wood and Barnes are one of the Premier League’s most potent strike partnerships but they are not exactly two peas in a pod.
Barnes is more outspoken, part of the group of Burnley players who travel to training from south Manchester in the Mercedes Viano people carrier he and Ashley Westwood clubbed together to buy, with dance music playing on the one-hour drive over the Pennines and occasional singalongs on the way home.
Unlike Barnes, 30, Wood does not have a school run to negotiate so he arrives earlier than what is known among the squad as the ‘Ash Cabs’ group — usually in time for breakfast. ‘I can’t afford their cab fares in any case,’ jokes the 27-year-old New Zealander.
None of this has any bearing on the way the two operate together on a football field. The notion of a strike partnership seems outdated in an age in which 4-4-2 is a pejorative term but Barnes and Wood’s combination has made Burnley one of only three teams, with Liverpool and Manchester City, for whom two players have each scored 14 or more goals in 2019.
Barnes scored 12 goals last season and Wood hit 10 and they already have six apiece this time, including two each across consecutive 3-0 wins which put Burnley seventh before Crystal Palace’s arrival at Turf Moor today.
But this is not a partnership in the Keegan/Toshack mould, with a cannier, more diminutive provider acting as foil to the big man. Each has directly assisted the other in scoring just three times in 2019 and neither could be described as diminutive.
At 6ft 3in, Wood is only two inches taller than Barnes.
They combine by bringing a dual physical threat which central defenders hate in an age when — with generally only one centre forward to contend with — they usually have ample time to play out elegantly from the back. The shock of encountering what Barnes and Wood bring is best witnessed in the immediate aftermath of a game. After Burnley had beaten Everton 1-0 at Turf Moor in October, Michael Keane and Yerry Mina looked like two utterly devastated individuals.
‘Defenders are not really used to that nowadays,’ says Barnes, as the two sit down at the club’s impeccable Barnfield training base, built in 2017 and designed in large part by manager Sean Dyche. ‘Most teams play one up front, so one of the centre halves they’re up against can relax and be on the ball and look fantastic, dribbling out from the back.
‘It’s easier for us, being the two. We don’t give the defenders much time on the ball. We are physical and like to come off the pitch being sure that defenders think they’ve been in a fight, not: “Oh, we’ve been brilliant on the ball”. We don’t want that. If we have to hustle and bustle and shove and barge, so be it.
‘We’d say we’ve got plenty more to our game but something like us — two big lumps, operating in the box as much as possible — is something defenders are unfamiliar with. We play close together and we cause defenders havoc.’
A lot of the goals are aerial, pure and simple. Prodigious 20-year-old winger Dwight McNeil is as frequent a deliverer as James Tarkowski, who provides back post knockdowns from set pieces. Drill into the details of the goals the two have scored, though, and a sophistication materialises.
At West Ham last season there was a spearing header from Barnes down to Wood, who required two sharp touches — left foot, right foot — to score.
And Barnes’ overhead kick at West Bromwich a season earlier, when Wood’s presence two yards in front of him drew two defenders away and created the space.
Or the three-player, 10-touch move, beginning with Wood and drawing in Westwood, which Barnes finished clinically at Huddersfield last winter. ‘You get some centre halves who are up to the challenge and that’s where we have to be smart as a pair of strikers and realise that from the off,’ says Barnes, whose 38 goals for Burnley make him the club’s top Premier League marksman.
‘We see which centre half to play on, which we think is the weaker one of the two, and capitalise on that and try to make our movement around him.’
This process does not require an onfield conversation between them. ‘You can see it happening, unfolding in front of you,’ says Wood. ‘If I see him bullying a defender then he doesn’t need to tell me what he’s doing there. I can drop into the pocket behind him and pick the balls he’s winning. Or if I’m getting in behind one of them he sees that. He can use the space that creates.
‘You see it. You just see it happening. It’s never one of us taking the lead. It’s whatever the game or scenario throws up. One starts quicker, makes something happen, perhaps finds a weakness The other sees that’s happening and thinks, OK we can use that.’
They are picking up each other’s thoughts now, warming to this process of analysis in a way which suggests that they’ve never been asked to explore the small details in quite the same way before.
That’s perhaps because the conversation about Burnley generally morphs into lumpen talk about physicality, usually initiated by a manager with a grievance.
The numbers are once again revealing: Barnes has been booked three times this season and Wood not once. Only nine teams have fewer yellows than Burnley in the current campaign.
A clue that Burnley might have buried gold in this pairing was to be found in the obscurity of Brighton and Hove Albion’s League One promotion campaign eight years ago. That success was built on three big strikers — Barnes, newly arrived from Plymouth, Wood, on loan from West Brom, and Glenn Murray — bulldozing through defences together. Barnes finished with 18 league goals, Wood eight and Murray 22. Then the latter two left and Barnes became something of a five-goals-a-season player. Dyche picked him up for £450,000 in 2014.
When Wood arrived as a record signing three years later, the pair rarely found themselves deployed together as Dyche, like everyone else, settled for one up top.
But exactly a year ago next week, in a midweek home game against Liverpool, he experimented with deploying them both. Within 10 minutes they had combined to unlock Jurgen Klopp’s defence, Barnes navigating a long ball into the path of Wood who needed one touch too many to get a shot away. Liverpool won 3-1 but Burnley impressed. Barnes and Wood have started all but five league games in the 12 months since. In that period Burnley have won around 50 per cent of games they have started together and around 10 per cent when one or both have been missing.
Klopp complained that night about Burnley being unacceptably physical by launching sliding tackles on a water-saturated pitch. His assessment — questionable to many neutrals — was the kind of negativity the club have become accustomed to. ‘Snobbery is the right word to use,’ says Barnes. ‘Go back to the Fergie days at United and you saw them send the ball wide and cross it and they’re scoring. But because they’re Man United and fantastic players, they get different credit.’
‘People from the outside look at our game and seem to think it’s disgusting,’ Wood quietly intervenes. ‘People say it’s direct football. I don’t think it’s direct football. It’s effective football.’
Barnes doesn’t say it, but the fact he hasn’t had a look in for England is remarkable, and testament to the fact that conforming to the England DNA supersedes the quality of performance these days.
It rankles at Turf Moor more than any of Dyche’s players would ever publicly admit. ‘You see the England set-up going younger,’ Barnes reflects. ‘It’s obviously a great chance for those young boys to be getting chances at clubs but it changes with the generations.’
‘Perhaps it will swing back, people will want to go with 4-4-2 again and want to go with experience.’ Even at 30, Barnes has not given up on England.
He is perhaps the club’s most competitive player, obsessively looking for self-improvement at a training ground where the ‘legs, hearts, minds’ motto — Dyche’s mantra — is splashed across the walls. Barnes’ mindset is borne of some hard yards via Southern League side Paulton, Plymouth Argyle, spells on loan at Oxford United, Salisbury City, Eastbourne Borough and Torquay United before the Brighton move materialised. His manager at Paulton, Alan Jones, remains a family friend.
Wood has hardly taken the high road, either, leaving New Zealand at 16 for a career which took him to nine clubs, including seven loan spells, before Lancashire.
Barnes grins when the interview is finished, telling Wood he really wasn’t joking about Celine Dion. Perhaps they have a bit to learn about each other.
Or perhaps telepathy tests are misleading. Keegan and Toshack seemed to have passed one set by a TV news magazine programme in the early 1970s, until it emerged they’d been cheating.
They were by no means soulmates, either. But their goal-scoring partnership wasn’t so shabby.