Oliver Burke: ‘I feel like a proper footballer again, really good in myself’ | Football

“So that’s what he’s going on about!” Oliver Burke is laughing now, telling the story of his first day at Alavés and the moment when, visiting his new home ground and the training facilities on the road into Vitoria, northern Spain, everything fell into place. “I turn up and the guy taking me round is talking about bagpipes and stuff and I can’t really understand what he’s saying or why,” he says. “And I’m saying ‘yeah, yeah, that’s what we do in Scotland’, thinking he’s just having a bit of fun with me. Then I just remember walking onto the pitch and the groundsman coming over and going: ‘Hello, how you doing?’ in a Scottish accent. And I’m like: ‘What?’ And suddenly, it all made sense.”

Which, incidentally, is what Burke is trying to do now during this long, strikingly honest conversation: make sense of a career in which, aged 22, he is already at his sixth club in his fourth country – from Nottingham Forest to Bradford City and back, from there to RB Leipzig and on to West Brom before heading to Spain, via Celtic, and from there to who knows where. “It’s an adventure, but this is also my work, the sacrifices I have to make to play football,” he says. “But I don’t like calling it a job, it feels strange saying that, because I love it, enjoy it, it’s what I always dreamed of. And being here is something I’ll always talk about when I’m older.”

When he does, he might start, like today, with the man he met when he had just arrived. Not just any man, either. Burke isn’t sure what team he supports – “he might have said the other lot, you know,” the former Celtic forward smiles – but John Stewart, born in Falkirk and at Alavés since 2016, has been voted Spain’s best groundsman. He also played the bagpipes at Seve Ballesteros’s funeral, leading the cortege in full traditional dress. “When I met him, I realised what he’d been saying, it made sense: bagpipes, kilt and everything,” Burke says. “We had a good chat and he told me about the culture, the club, the town. It was really nice.”

He smiles. “And the pitch is in perfect condition.”

“Oh, it was brilliant,” he continues. “Little things like that when you go to another country is so welcoming. You meet someone, they’re so jolly, they speak the language, it really helps.”

Burke hasn’t got to grips with eating times yet: “I’m turning up at restaurants and the doors aren’t even open yet,” he says. The language is hard, lessons slow. And he can’t get the television working. “I’ll teach you,” says the captain, Manu García, popping his head round the door before heading home. Otherwise, though, things are good. García is one of six players who speak English, as does the assistant manager; Burke is playing more now; and Mendizorroza is “constantly rocking”, he says Even the weather is OK: windy, misty, cold, it could be the Highlands.

“This came last minute,” Burke says. “I was speaking to my agent, discussing options, putting my name out there, making sure [people knew] I was available on loan. If things aren’t working, you go to get game time. My agent said he had a La Liga club and I thought ‘Oh wow, yeah, that’s an amazing opportunity.’ He didn’t tell me which team at first. When he did, I Googled it and thought it was perfect. I looked at the wingers they had and thought I would get minutes. And what a league to do it in. I just wanted to play, enjoy the game, love the game again, you know?”

Realism runs through what Burke’s portrait of a football player. As he tells his story there’s a striking honesty. Once considered the future of Scottish football, twice breaking their transfer record, there’s an optimism there always, but he talks about plainly about bad moments as well as good, the pressures, and the times you want to escape it all.

The stories about the abuse players get are a good example. “Now I just blur it out, sometimes it even makes me smile,” he says, but it’s not always that easy and it goes back to his debut for Nottingham Forest as an 18-year-old against Spurs. “I got: ‘Big Ears!’. And I was like ‘Oh, no’. I just want to run back in here. I remember one at Stoke when I could almost feel his spit on my face, screaming about how rubbish I was. I could even hear people going ‘come on mate, give the lad a breather’. People say ‘Ah, it doesn’t bother them’. But it can bother us, we’re humans, we have feelings.”

That much is clear when Burke discusses the human side of football, things like living with the pressure – this is the player mentioned in the same breath as Denis Law and Kenny Dalglish – and the search for opportunities, how he felt when they weren’t there and how that brought him here. “At West Brom I felt very left out, not part of the team,” he says. “You train and go home, feeling down. Your motivation gets sucked away when you know that whatever you do your name won’t be on the team sheet. It’s not like you sack it off – never – but …” There’s a pause. “It’s hard to explain,” he says. “That feeling of going out there in front of the fans to do what you love, that’s what you train for. You just want to progress.

“Being here is a breath of fresh air. I haven’t been happier. I feel like a proper footballer again, really good in myself.”

Burke is a better player too, he thinks. He talks eloquently about a different style, a premium placed on positioning, relearning aspects of the game. Just this morning he was out there on his own after the session, working on his other foot, attacking from the opposite wing, trying to bring more variety into his game. There’s appreciation of the time his coach, Asier Garitano, gives him and he highlights what he still has to improve. “I reckon I’m doing about 50% right, 50% wrong still,” he says. “And that spurs you on.”

So do the opponents, the league. There is a nice moment when he talks about conversations with Scotland teammates that his eyes widen and a cheeky grin creeps across his face. “A lot of the boys ask: what’s the league like, is it good, who’ve you got when you go back? And I’m like: ‘Oh, we’re playing Real Madrid’.”

He is, too. On Saturday Gareth Bale and his team-mates tread John’s perfect pitch. So, let’s talk about Bale. Burke smiles again; he was expecting this. Bale is the man he has been compared to more than anyone else, after all. “I know, I know,” he smiles, “but it is nice.”

“I don’t like to put much pressure on myself but yeah that is my sort of football: get the ball, run with it, use my pace, create opportunities, cross. But I’m not saying: ‘I’m like Bale.’ That’s crazy. And sometimes that was happening at the start. He’s won league titles, Champions Leagues, scoring worldies. Being compared to him is nice, a compliment. But I’m Oliver Burke and I’m going to do what Oliver Burke does.”

What, then, is Oliver Burke going to do next? He is on loan from West Brom and while he may feel like staying by the end of the season, he knows that in five months it’s likely he’ll off again. “I’m a West Brom player on loan, even though my career there hasn’t gone very well so far, so I’m not totally in control,” he says. “I’m loving my time here, it’s going well, it’s a fantastic league but we’ll see. … In the summer it’s not really in my hands, so just go with the flow.”