The redemption of Dan Burn sounds like a movie that Denzel Washington would voiceover.

‘Born in Blyth, Northumberland, this towering defender…’ you know the type.

From being called up into the England squad, scoring a goal and lifting a trophy at Wembley with your local boyhood club, feeling the outpouring of emotion in the city and wider area after winning the first domestic silverware for Newcastle United in 70 years, to being nominated for the ‘Freedom of Northumberland’ by the County Council – what a week he’s had.

Big Dan was released by the Magpies as a kid. You can bet that he stewed on that for a good while. Burn’s ancestors were, you see, a border reiver family of some note during the troubled times on the frontier between England and Scotland in a time marked by blood feuds, vengeance and retribution.

They famously murdered THIRTY-FIVE members of the Collingwood family in 1596 after they’d killed Ralph ‘Shortneck’ Burn and had been involved in the hanging of Geordie Burn, who had been captured by the Selby family in a hot-trod – the legal action of taking back of stolen stock immediately after a raid.

The reiver’s nicknames could be ironic and you have to wonder if ‘Shortneck’ in fact had a long neck like that of his distant relative, who stretched it to nod that header into the bottom corner of the Liverpool net.

‘Shortneck’ was part of raid from East Teviotdale, near Yetholm on the Scottish side of the border, that stole twenty-four cattle and a lance from Gavin Collingwood of Berwick in 1589. The reivers rode in family-based gangs, and ‘Shortneck’ was joined by his relations young Jock Burn of the Cote, Tom Burn of Awtonburn, Charlie Burn of Elisheugh and Gib Burn of the Lough on that one.

The organised criminal gangs could also be violent, and three men were murdered, six men and women mutilated, and £100 worth of goods stolen when the Burns Old Jock of the Cote and his son young Jock, Mark and Geordie Burn of Elisheugh, Mark and Steven Burn of the Lough and thirty others attacked Thorton.

At that time the Burns were also at feud with the Earl of Northumberland’s servants and the Middle March Warden, Sir Robert Carey, the leading English official in the area.

So, it’s not hard to imagine Dan Burn being determined to prove the people that dismissed him as not good enough in childhood wrong – and has he.

Big Dan’s not the only reiver descendant from Northumberland to have played top-flight football – the England World Cup-winning Charlton brothers, Jack and Bobby, from nearby Ashington, were off the well-known north Tynedale family.

* If you’re interested in finding out more about the border reivers, Jon Tait’s new book ‘Raiders along the Anglo-Scottish Border – A history of those Pacified by King James’ is being released later this year.