Dan Burn: 'That'll stand the test of time. We're not going to be here forever, but that will live beyond us' | OneFootball

We have already had Dan Burn Week and we are now somewhere in the middle of Dan Burn Month. It may yet go down as Dan Burn Year. A few days ago, Dan Burn met Dan Burn the baby goat at Whitehouse Farm near Morpeth. "Very cute," nods Burn the centre half, not the animal. But he is yet to enjoy a stroll along the Big Dan Burn Walk in the Northumberland National Park. "That's very surreal," he adds. Or perhaps he could head back to Blyth, where he grew up, and do whatever he is entitled to do when he becomes an honorary freeman of the county (which, it turns out, isn't really anything).

It has all been a bit "strange", a little "weird"; a glorious, emotionally intense kind of odd. Burn is not quite a natural fit for the spotlight - he has spent much of his life and career embracing the role of the underdog - but in time has got used to the affection he has received since coming home three years ago. Local endearment turned national in March when he received his first England call-up, which he followed with a goal for the ages in the Carabao Cup final win against Liverpool at Wembley a couple of days later.

There has been a lot to take in, to react to, to think about. "I'm trying to stay as present as possible. When you're thinking about what we've done as a club and as a team, you can get carried away," says the 32-year-old, who has won the club's Sela Player of the Month award. "We've spoken for so long about the team that first wins a cup, how it would feel, what it would do for the city… I'm trying, as much as possible, just to be focused now. I don't know if that's the way I am, or just the way we are as footballers, but now that's out the way my focus has completely switched again now - 'right, we've got ten games left, let's go'.

"It's strange. After the final I felt really numb. It was weird. I was wanting to win but it had been so long that you're just never really prepared for it, so when it happened, it was a bit like, 'what do you do? How do you celebrate?' I would say it probably wasn't until the parade that I could see what it meant to people. It was hard at Wembley - the crowd was just a sea of black and white - but when you were on the parade you could see people's faces, they were getting emotional. It was making me emotional. It was hard trying not to cry in front of the lads."

He is well aware that looking back on his cup final opener is something he'll be asked to do for years. Last season, he said he thought he would "struggle to top" his goal in the 4-1 Champions League win over Paris Saint-Germain. It felt like the zenith of Burn's slaloming career but that take feels old now. "Everything sort of went perfectly," he says of his header. "Straight after, it was weird. Normally after I score I'm quite happy, buzzing, a big smile on my face. But I was just so pumped for that game, emotion-wise. I think we got it pretty right as a team, where we had emotion and were ready for it - but we weren't too far the other way, where it took over you." His goal - the Magpies’ first at Wembley since 1999 - helped banish a ghost. "We were gutted last time (in the 2023 final) that we didn't have anything to cheer about. The fans were still bouncing about, with the flags up, and you were looking at the Man U end and there was nothing going on. I thought, 'this isn’t fair on them either'."

'Overwhelming' is another word Burn repeats often in half an hour of conversation in the Sir Bobby Robson Room at the club's training centre. His phone blew up after the final, as it had when Thomas Tuchel called him up just over 48 hours previously. "I wanted to reply to everyone. The messages were so nice. People had taken time to message us. I didn't want to just send back something, I wanted to reply properly. That stressed us for a bit. I'm still getting messages now and trying to reply to them.

"It's overwhelming, just because you'd never really have imagined yourself in this position. Nothing's really changed for me - I'm still playing football, just doing my day-to-day stuff - whereas for everyone else, the perception has changed. It's weird."

He admits that it is dangerously easy to get lost in the memories of what he has experienced in the last few weeks. "I think right at this moment, it's a bad thing. We've spoken a bit about it but in football, once you've achieved something like that, you can relax a bit and think, 'we've won a cup, we're getting that European play-off place - sweet'. But the best teams are the ones who just go again, go again and go again, and want to keep improving. I like that mentality anyway - I wouldn't just sit back on it. But you try not to let things distract you as much. I'm happy for everyone else to talk about it and everyone else to be buzzing, but now I'm at the point where I'm ready to go again and see what’s next."

Burn says he has always felt capable of "putting things in a box", of switching focus and moving on without overthinking. He had to on the night of the final, leaving the players' celebrations early to join up with England. There were some nerves before training with the Three Lions for the first time. "You don’t want to feel it of your depth. But as soon as I got through that session, I was like, 'ah, I’m sweet'. Don't get us wrong - the standard was ridiculously high, but nothing I didn't feel as if I could cope with. I knew once I got through that first session, I'd back myself in training so I could give myself a chance to play. I felt as if it was a clean slate for everyone."

There have been times in Burn's journey up from non-league where he has felt underestimated or underappreciated. He is more sure of himself now. A semantic point made by a coach while he was with England helps explain the approach he has adopted in recent years. "I'd said, like, 'thanks to the manager for giving us a chance'. And he said, 'it's not a chance - you've played nearly 500 league games'," he recalls. "Early in my career I used to compare myself to other people and what other players were doing: 'I wish I could do that, I wish I could do what he does as a centre back, I was I was a bit quicker', all those sort of things. But then you realise that you’re playing every week, you're getting picked, so there must be something you're doing right. 'Stop comparing yourself to other people - you know your strengths, so just play off those strengths'.

"If I compare myself to all the other defenders that are playing for England or have played for England, I'll be miserable – do you know what I mean? I think it's just more that I know I've got strengths that people like in a team, because wherever I go I tend to play, and I just try to use those strengths to put me in a better position."

He hardly spent any time in his room while with Tuchel's squad, keen to make the most of the week. Before his England debut against Albania back at Wembley, staff handed over personalised kits for his children, Indi and Ari, who are still too young to fully appreciate their father's place in his city's folklore. "I would have loved to have scored that goal," he says of his first half header that thumped the crossbar. "But it's a bit greedy to want that as well."

Perhaps, as a senior international, Burn can no longer be considered an underdog. He isn't sure. "I feel like that's probably why people have been happy for us - they've seen where I've come from to where I've managed to be last few weeks. The amount of messages I've had is amazing - it was so nice reading them all. I still feel as if I am viewed like that, and that's fine, because I still see myself like that," he says. "Even making the England team, I know there'll be people who don't think I should be playing for England, who don't think I'll make the next camp, or they don't think I'll go to the World Cup. I've always used that as fuel, and wanted to use that to push myself.

"People might not even be saying those things - but to me, that's what I feel like people would be saying, so it's more of a mentality thing. I still feel as though I'm proving people wrong. I still want to be playing in this team in two years' time when people will be saying I'm too old. I'll always be finding a reason for someone to think I shouldn't be doing what I'm doing."

Others on Tyneside have celebrated Burn’s successes like they were their own. His family, including his parents, David and Kay, were there to take in his five dream-realising days in London, as were close friends he has held since childhood. Some belated normality came with the school run and breakfast with his wife, Roz, on his return last week. On his new Instagram account, he shared a video of his Easter egg decorating competition effort on his daughter's behalf, and found himself cherishing the "stuff that we normally do. It's been carnage for a couple of weeks, so it was just getting back to our normal life."

He says he had to compose himself during United's bus parade and Town Moor celebrations on Saturday, and then again when the image of him heading the ball was beamed into the sky during Sela's drone show. He shakes his head. "Class. Unreal. Someone got a ledge photo when I turned round. I turned round to say to my mate, 'have you seen that?' and someone caught us. It's a great picture. There's lot of little moments that will be class to look back on when I'm done, and I'll have loads of stuff that I'll be able to go through and that, but it's hard because it's my personality to just go, 'right, what's next?'"

He says hasn't thought about his status changing as a result of being a significant part of a historic achievement, but the magnitude of it all is obvious. Newcastle United is his club. He is running out of ways to articulate it, but he knows. "That'll stand the test of time. We're not going to be here forever, but that will live beyond us. People will still talk about it when we're long gone, which is just crazy."

The night he signed for the club from Brighton in January 2022, as he sat in the manager's office at St. James' Park after trying on the black and stripes for the first time, it dawned on Burn that his move was "going to completely change my life". That was before he helped keep them up in that first season, then qualify for the Champions League, that night against PSG, the Tyne-Wear derby win, and now all this. Did it change as much as it seems? "More than anything I would ever have imagined," he says. "It's class. I just keep saying that. I really hope it's not like some mad dream that I'm having, and I'm back at Asda pushing trolleys. Everything that I would have wanted to do in my whole career, I've managed to do in three years at Newcastle."

But he has helped to change the club too. Burn pauses. "I've never really thought of it like that," he adds. "It's nice to be part of a positive bit of history. Not to say too much about what happened beforehand, but there wasn't a lot of ambition - there would never have been ambition that we could win a cup or play in the Champions League, so it's so nice that everything seems to have clicked and we're trying to drive it as much as possible."

He may not agree but he is unlikely to be viewed as an underdog now. Burn is one of the main characters in a story that will be passed down through generations of Newcastle United fans; if not quite a legend, he has been instrumental in something legendary. He still feels he is improving, on an upward curve. "All those years of not playing academy football might have actually worked in my favour," he says, "just purely because I'm getting it at the back end of my career."

It may be good timing. There's a World Cup in 2026 and that tournament in the United States, Mexico and Canada looks like the final frontier in the "mind-blowing, mad career I've had". He could make it. Why not? "That's my mentality with it," he replies. "It's just over a year away. Don't get us wrong - I'm going to have to keep playing as well as I am right the way through to that, and I know a lot can change. But something that wasn't even on my radar is there now.

"It's good to have new targets that you want to hit. Even at Newcastle, without saying that it was, it probably was a burden how long it was. Now that a team has done that, it feels like it's not so much a big thing any more. There's nothing saying we couldn't go next year and challenge for another cup and do it. We've got the experience of winning it now, so we know how to do it. It's exciting."