Chris Wilder has taken to describing this season as “painful” but it became positively agonizing as Burnley inflicted deeper wounds on their Championship challenger. Sheffield United players.
No metaphorical band-aid is likely to be big enough to hide the psychological damage that Vincent Kompany's team gleefully inflicted when Burnley They recovered from a shaky start to play with the newfound confidence befitting a team that has now lost just one of its last seven league games.
While the Blades remain entrenched at the bottom of the table, 10 points from safety, 19th-placed Burnley are now just three points behind fourth-bottom Nottingham Forest, although they have played one more game. After spending the entire campaign in the relegation zone, survival is tantalizingly within reach.
Given that this pair had kept just three clean sheets in the league between them all season, goals seemed inevitable. The only surprise was that Bramall Lane had to wait 38 minutes for the defense to fracture. However, once Sheffield United's rearguard was divided, two came in three terrible minutes for Ivo Grbic.
First, Jacob Bruun Larsen had a bit of luck after his rather speculative strike at the ball was deflected by a wrong-footed Grbic as he wriggled, almost apologetically, across the line. Poor Grbic then looked completely mortified after failing to save Lorenz Assignon's slightly grazed shot.
Oli McBurnie really should have opened the scoring in the ninth minute, but the Sheffield United forward shot too close to Arijanet Muric, who still made a good save. Muric also did well to knock another McBurnie attempt over the bar after a pass from Gustavo Hamer spotted the defence. By then, however, the balance of power had begun to tip in Burnley's favor. And especially in the center of the field.
That department saw a collision of the Blades' past and future with Norway international Sander Berge, sold by Sheffield United for £12m last summer, facing United's brightest young prospect, 19-year-old Oliver Arblaster. The hope in South Yorkshire is that the teenager can follow in the recent footsteps of former Blades Harry Maguire, Kyle Walker, Aaron Ramsdale and Dominic Calvert-Lewin and earn a place in the England squad.
If some of Arblaster's touches demonstrated precisely why he is being pursued by a number of leading clubs, Berge's passes – all obediently booed by his once-adoring Bramall Lane crowd – tended to be at the center of Burnley's best moves. .
It was painful for the home fans, many of whom booed their team at half-time. As the second half began, the number of empty seats suggested that some feared a repeat of what happened at Sheffield United. 5-0 defeat at Turf Moor in December and suddenly remembered that they had something better to do that afternoon.
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They missed a tremendous goal from Hamer when the Brazilian midfielder reignited the contest. After putting Assignon on his backside and preparing to shoot with his left foot, he instead cut in and fired a shot past Muric.
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The Burnley goalkeeper needed to make an important save to deny Ben Brereton Díaz before Lyle Foster restored the visitors' two-goal lead. When Assignon atoned for his humiliation at Hamer's feet by deftly telling him to get up, an unmarked Foster had time and space to extend his right foot and exacerbate Grbic's misery.
Their afternoon got even worse when substitute Johann Berg Gudmundsson scored with his first touch, the newcomer imperiously sending a curling left-footed shot into the back of the net seconds after coming off the bench.
