WELL after the week that was, I have to say that I am delighted the whole sorry ‘Coylegate’ sage has now been put to bed.

New boss Brian Laws may not have been everyone’s first choice – regular readers will know I shoved Martin Jol’s rather large frame forward – but he was the first choice of the man that matters, and that is good enough for me.

Nobody will have felt the pain of Coyle’s defection to Bolton more than Barry Kilby.

We were all guilty of being dazzled by all the “new Shankly” talk when Coyle waltzed into our lives, but the Clarets chairman was the one who put his trust into a relative unknown.

That trust was crushed last week when Coyle decided that Bolton gave him a better chance of still being a Premier League boss next August. Time will tell if he has made the right choice, as it will with Kilby’s choice of Laws.

But the one thing to remember is that Barry is a Claret through and through.

He was the one who has had to sit through those interviews, read the vast array of CVs that will have landed on the door mat at Turf Moor and ultimately the one who spent sleepless nights deliberating his next move for the club. His club. Our club.

And he has decided that Brian Laws – a former Claret himself – is the one who will pick up the baton which Coyle unceremoniously dumped.

For me, reputations count for very little these days. All I want is a manager to be as genuinely passionate about this great club as myself and the thousands of Clarets around the globe are.

Kilby clearly feels Laws shares his passion and I have no reason to doubt that.

For Laws, this is a chance like no other.

Redemption and salvation can be sought in the strangest of places, in Laws’ case it will be in the full glare of the watching public, both locally and nationally.

His stock couldn’t have been much lower, axed by Sheffield Wednesday a month or so ago with the once great Owls languishing in the bottom three of the Championship.

But results don’t always tell the whole story and the least we can do is give our full support to Laws, and I urge any fan who has his or her doubts to cast them aside.

Laws himself has admitted he is a workaholic, his passion is there for all to see – just try asking his former striker Ivano Bonetti who was on the wrong end of a plate of Grimsby Fried Chicken when he dared to under-perform during an ill-fated spell with the Mariners – and he has already said he will do everything in his power to keep us in the top flight. Now, we need to meet him half-way.

The club’s new Together We Are Burnley campaign was a marketing masterstroke, a perfect pick up when many of us were thinking things couldn’t get any worse.

But behind the slogan, the celebrity endorsements and the desktop themes, the message is strong.

The world and his wife wrote us off before the season even started yet together we have have stood shoulder-to-shoulder, directors, players, fans and staff.

Let’s not break that bond. Welcome home Brian.