If ever a football bench tells a story then the one above is it.  The club is Burnley, which in the decade from the 1956-57 season finished in the top six of the English First Division six times in ten, five of which were under the management of the man sitting second from the left, Harry Potts. Durham-born, a successful inside forward, he had enjoyed a ten year playing career. Four had been at Burnley itself before six more at Everton. And he would spend fourteen years in the hot-seat at his first club in two stints of twelve and two. But it is the two mean seated at either end that are perhaps of equal interests. On the left is Ray Bennion, a Welshman, a right-half, who from 1921 had spent nine seasons at Manchester United as a more or less regular and then pre-Potts joined Burnley for a final thirty games over two seasons. And he would never leave the town, dying there in 1968 as had in 1966 the man on the right. He is Billy Dougall, a left-half, born in Denny in Stirlingshire, who had played the junior game with the town's Hibernian team, a factory of players in the era, not least Jimmy McMullan, joined Falkirk late at the age of 26 in 1921 for five  seasons and then spent a final two and half at Turf Moor before in 1928 at 34 injury brought an end on the pitch.

Bennion and Dougall never played together, at least not competitively.  In fact on retirement the Scot returned home to study physiotherapy before moving as a coach to the London club, Thames, that for two brief years from 1930 played in the Third Division South. But he stayed just a season before become assistant manager to Airdrie-born, Alex Macfarlane, at Charlton and when the ex. Scottish international left for Blackpool Dougall moved also to Lancashire but to become reserve team coach at the Clarets, where he teamed up two years later with Bennion stepping across.

Both worked under the club's first manager rather than secretary, Bob Bromilow, but it lasted just a season. In 1935 Bromilow moved on to Crystal Palace and Burnley reverted to selection by committee,  but notably with Dougall as a member, a set-up that was not changed until 1945. It was then that former Everton inside-forward, Cliff Britton, was appointed.  He arrived at a club that seems to have had no Scots players on its books. And in the three years he was in place there was little change. It was in sharp contrast to what Burnley had been at various times in its existence.  Within two seasons of its foundation in 1882 it had its first Anglo, Dan Friel, recruited from Vale of Leven via Accrington. Within three it had ten and the Scots compliment remain at near and even above that level for the next decade. And again in the late 1920s, the Dougall playing era, it reached ten once more, whilst a decade later under the Committee including Dougall there was a maximum of six.

And with the departure of Bromilow, back to Everton, and Bennion and Dougall working diligently in the background the Scots contingent once more began to rise. But this time it was happening with a Scots manager, Frank Hill, born in Forfar, a player recruited by Herbert Chapman to Arsenal. Under him for the six seasons he was at Turf Moor Burnley started mid-table, recruited more but not very many Scots, rose to sixth. At this point Hill moved down the road to Preston, Burnley slipped back initially under new, first-time manager and former Burnley player for Bromilow, Alan Brown, who doubled the Scots input to eight, kept it high, the club recovered position and an extensive youth system was put in place or rather put in place once more. One wonders what was the Dougall contribution. Certainly when in 1957 Brown was tempted away to Sunderland and Dougall took over the number of Scots in the squad went up a notch and at the end of the season Burnley was in the top six of the First Division once more. However, to be fair, Dougall's leadership was somewhat notional. He had health problems, was having hospital treatment for a time, it was Ray Bennion who filled in and clearly to great effect for the middle portion of the season until a new, old face appeared. It was Harry Potts.

Potts had been an inside-forward, who had spent six years at Everton, playing fifty-nine times but before that had made one hundred and sixty-five appearances in the four years from 1946 at Burnley. However, although he had grown up in Hetton-le-Hole in Durham, where his best friend had been none other than Bob Paisley, he had joined the Lancashire club as a sixteen year-old as one of the earliest participants in the club's youth development system first iteration. The year was 1937. The Committee was charge with Dougall providing the coaching input.

So it was that Potts was in footballing terms Burnley through and through. He was in picking up the managerial reins in February 1958 stepping into the known both in terms of club structure and personnel. He would have Bennion to one side and Dougall, now officially the club's physiotherapist, to the other, on and off the bench. It was his boot-room and with it Burnley would finish sixth, seventh and then Champion. And it would do it overwhelmingly with the product of its youth system plus the guile of the inestimable Northern Irishman, Jimmy McIlroy, and with a style of football that might not have been obviously expected in the Calder Valley, at least not as the Fifties became the Sixties. It was with a fluid, short-passing game that might otherwise have been thought to be Scots. 

So it was that in the 1960-61 season Burnley was the English representative in Europe, reaching the European Cup quarter-final. The following year the club finished runner-up in both FA Cup, to the Nicholson development of push-and-run Spurs, and the League, to the Ramsey-Duncan, so the Scots and pre-Spurs, push-and-run product that was Ipswich. And, though it was in reality the pinnacle of Burnley's successes and there was some falling off, it was not the end. In 1962-63 Burnley were third in the League. In 1963-64 it was ninth with a narrow loss in the 6th round of the Cup to the eventual winners, West Ham, in 1964-65 it was twelfth and in 1965-66 it was back to third and therefore re-entry the following season into Europe through the Fairs Cup. However, that was to be it, in the meantime there had been several changes with in 1970 and after four season stuck at 14th in the table Potts himself was moved to General Manager and two years later leaving the club altogether at least for the moment. He would be rehired in 1977, steady a further sinking ship but already in the October of his third season back be sacked on the face of it on the basis of poor results, nevertheless with Burnley not able to improve without him as they might have with and thus be relegated.

However, in the period between successes built on the slick, short-passing game, which Burnley had developed over the previous thirty, almost forty years, there had been several in retrospect critical changes, the keys to Harry Potts' initial successes and the solution of the puzzle that was his subsequent decline. In 1963 to raise funds for the club and with two, perhaps three, more seasons in the players' legs Jimmy McIlroy had had to be sold. He went to Stoke.  Potts no doubt wished for a replacement. He never found one, neither by expensive buys, his practice in later years, buying in and bringing through, as with McIlroy, or from the Burnley youth system.  Then in 1964 Ray Bennion retired. He was sixty-seven and suffering from ill-health. He would die in 1968. And to my mind most critical of all at the end of the 1964-65 season Billy Dougall announced his retirement at the age of almost seventy. A little under a year later he too was dead, passing away in his home in Burnley itself.  And just like the Northern Irishman neither the Welshman or the Scot were ever replaced. Indeed the last two never could be because they at Burnley, just as Shankly and Bennett were at Liverpool and Busby was at Old Trafford were the direct carriers of the Scottish game when it was different and superior. Thus we had in the three coaching decades and the playing generation after the Second World War influence in two camps but from the same source, Scotland,. They were those that were direct as above, the last being the third man in the  Clough and Taylor partnership at Nottingham Forest and Derby, Jimmy Gordon, and indirectly the disciples, knowing or not, of Peter McWilliam at Spurs itself twice over, at West Bromwich through Vic Buckingham and with the same onward to Ajax and Barcelona, at Charlton with Jimmy Seed, with Don Revie at Leeds via the Duncan's, McDowall and Leicester, and finally Alf Ramsey via Spurs once more and Ipswich and arguably to English national team itself and 1966. And this while the Continental pot was stirred and being quietly stirred further by a combination of the same McWilliam ladle and Jimmy Hogan's equally quietly potent one.