Ex-player claims to get pilot’s licence and fly plane over ground mocking old team after relegation
Ryan Burge’s hatred of Port Vale appears to have reached new heights after he claimed to have flown a plane over Vale Park on Saturday mocking their relegation to League Two.
Burge’s vendetta against Port Vale started after he was suspended for two weeks following an incident hours before a 2-0 defeat at Bristol Rovers on March 12, 2013.
He subsequently left the Valiants by mutual consent after reaching an agreement on his contract, which was due to expire that summer.
Port Vale secured promotion in 2012/13 and users of a club fan site voted him one of their three Players of the Season despite his premature departure.
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Burge was suspended by Vale after he missed a pre-match meal and then criticised the club on social media.
Manager at the time, Micky Adams said: “Ryan didn’t turn up for the pre-match meal. He should have been at the hotel at 4.30pm and he still wasn’t there at 5.15, so what am I supposed to do?
“Then he puts a load of rubbish on his Twitter feed. It’s absolute nonsense and he’s going to be disciplined.”
Burge insisted on Twitter (now X) that he was supposed to be picked up at a service station instead of making his own way.
His 2013 tweets read:
‘For starters the plan was for me to be picked up by the coach at Michael wood services. I should never have been making my own way there’
‘After numerous unanswered calls and txts the one time I hear anything back it’s a message to tell me to go home I’m not needed’
‘If u believe anything else u may aswell believe I was ill or late saturday. This is all I will say’
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Burge says that he refused to play for the club again and that Port Vale breached their own non-disclosure clause by ‘further defaming my name by providing poor character references to other clubs in a malicious attempt to put them off signing me’.
He believes Vale did this as they were ‘extremely bitter and couldn’t let the situation go’ after he rejected a two-year contract extension and refused to play for the club again after ‘defaming my name by telling lies to me about the press’.
Box office stuff, this.
Bitter ex-Port Vale player mocks League One relegation
The latest incident involving Burge – who applied for the club’s managerial role in 2017 and somehow did not get it – and Port Vale is the best one yet.
Following the club’s relegation to League Two, Burge claims to have flown a plane over Vale Park holding a banner that referenced Stoke City’s anthem, lyrics from the Tom Jones song ‘Delilah’, with the name of a Potters hooligan firm.
The banner read: ‘She stood there laughing – N40’.
This potentially means that Burge’s agenda against Port Vale is so strong that he has gone out of his way to get a pilot’s license to fly a plane over Vale Park to celebrate the club’s relegation.
The 35-year-old wrote on his Facebook page:
‘Wow… Just landed. Thank you to the Stoke City fans who paid me to do something I would have happily done for free. A bit of a shaky take off but I put that down to the excitement.
‘However once I got her up in the sky it was smooth all the way from there and shout out to my instructor Geoff who was guiding me all the way. This is an experience I will cherish for the rest of my life. Fail Park looks like an even bigger sh*t hole from the Sky.’
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