APPLAUSE greeted the funeral cortege of a North-East born footballer in his adopted home town yesterday.

Former Sunderland manager Jimmy Adamson made his name as player and later manager of Burnley, leading the Lancashire club to the Football League championship as captain in the 1959-60 season.

Scores of former Burnley players and other figures from the game, including fellow Ashington-born footballer Sir Bobby Charlton, joined family and friends at his funeral service in Burnley yesterday.

It followed his death, aged 82, last Tuesday.

About 200 supporters, many wearing the club’s claret and blue colours, clapped as the cortege passed Burnley’s Turf Moor ground.

Adamson left his Northumberland home town to join Burnley aged only 17, but did not make his club debut until 1954, after National Service with the RAF.

A wing-half, he played 486 games for the club, between 1947 and 1976, during which he became the only ever Burnley player to be named Footballer of the Year, when he was 33.

Apart from leading them to one of only two league title triumphs in the club’s history, Adamson also captained Burnley in their last FA Cup Final appearance, a 3-1 defeat against Spurs at Wembley, in 1962.

He is best known in the North-East for a colourful, if eventually unsuccessful, twoyear stint as Sunderland manager in the late Seventies.

Following a brief spell with Sparta Rotterdam in Holland, Adamson took over from Sunderland’s FA Cup-winning manager Bob Stokoe in November 1976 and saw his new side lose its first seven games without scoring a goal.

Famously introducing a group of local young talent, including Gary Rowell, Shaun Elliott and Kevin Arnott, he oversaw a rapid turnaround including a run of four wins during which 17 goals were scored and only one conceded.

It was not quite enough to save Sunderland, who were narrowly relegated after a controversial last day to the 1976-77 season, losing 2-0 at Everton as rivals Coventry and Bristol City both escaped the drop by playing out a tame finish to a 2-2 draw.

Having failed to bring Sunderland straight back up the following season, he left Roker Park in October 1978 before spending two years at the helm at Leeds.

During his final journey, following yesterday’s funeral service, the cortege again stopped several times as it passed Turf Moor, where a lounge has been named in Adamson’s honour.

In homage to his North- East roots, mourners left the crematorium to the strains of Geordie Ridley’s famous Victorian music hall anthem The Blaydon Races.