Dan Burn is 34 years old, 6-foot-7, and probably the most honest guy left on any World Cup roster. The England defender did something rare in professional sports this week. He admitted that his personal best-case scenario for the tournament would be to never set foot on the pitch.
“Really, you kind of don’t want to have to come on at all because that means we’ll win the World Cup,” Burn said ahead of England’s semi-final against Argentina. “It’s a hard one, mentally, because the best case scenario for the team is that I’m not needed at all, but that also means that I don’t get on the pitch.”
The ‘Special Operations’ Defender
Burn was a surprise inclusion in Thomas Tuchel’s England squad this summer. The Newcastle center-back has never been a flashy name. He came up through non-league soccer, made his first-team debut at Darlington, and spent years bouncing around before establishing himself as a Premier League regular.
Tuchel told him straight up that he probably wouldn’t start any games. But the manager wanted him anyway. And Burn was fine with that.
“I knew the role that I was coming in to play and just wanted to sort of do that to the best of my ability,” he said.
That role, as Tuchel described it, is basically a closer. England has been defending narrow leads in the knockout rounds against Mexico and Norway. Burn came off the bench both times to help lock things down. He is not a guy you build a back line around for 90 minutes. He is a guy you call in for 15 minutes of controlled chaos when you need someone to head crosses out of the box and not make a mistake.
From Washing His Own Kit to a World Cup Semi
Burn was asked when in his career he felt farthest away from a moment like this. He didn’t hesitate.
“It would have been starting out with Darlington,” he said. “When I was a kid, you had to wash your own kit and take packed lunches in and then you were ball boys for the first team at the weekend.”
He talked about playing Tuesday nights for the first team, then driving home late, washing his gear on a radiator in the middle of the night, and driving back to Darlington the next day. It’s not glamorous. But it shaped him.
“It made me want it a little bit more. It might not have had that effect with other people, but I just felt like mentally I had the edge over people, and I was prepared to go to further lengths.”
“I can’t say I ever dreamt of being in a World Cup semi-final, because it was so far off the radar.”
Now he’s here. Lionel Messi and Argentina are waiting. And Burn, the guy who got into England’s squad mostly because Tuchel trusted him to close out a 1-0 lead, might end up being the answer to a trivia question nobody saw coming.
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