Dyche’s men will meet challenges
SEAN DYCHE has revealed a clear-the-air meeting helped Burnley’s squad rediscover form after a nosedive towards relegation trouble. The Clarets had lost nine of 11 Premier League matches and tumbled into the bottom three before Sunday’s 2-0 home win over West Ham. Dyche’s side are still in the relegation zone as they travel to Huddersfield tonight but will climb out of it if they can better Southampton’s result at Chelsea. Burnley manager Dyche is going through arguably the toughest spell of his six years in charge at Turf Moor, but believes his players are showing the character needed to get themselves right again.
He said: “At the halfway stage of a season you reflect and make sense of it. We had a meeting the other day and just said, ‘Right, here we are, this is the reality’. “We make sure the players know in real terms the challenge that’s in front of us and then it’s a question of how we can affect that challenge.
“We shared a few views on it, picked a team, and they then showed they were willing to take the challenge on, because that was a performance full of endeavour, fight and quality against West Ham.”
Dyche has regular team meetings to talk through the team’s progress but this one came at a vital time with Burnley sinking.
It followed a humiliating 5-1 defeat at home by Everton on Boxing Day, with the manager making five changes for the West Ham game to shake up his side. That included dropping keeper Joe Hart and bringing in Tom Heaton, who made an outstanding late save from Andy Carroll and is set to keep his place tonight. Dyche added: “We do 10-game meetings, halfway meetings, and at different stages of the season. We always have a certain point where we reflect on what we’ve done and what we’re going to do. This has been standard over six years.
“When you see a team that can perform and it doesn’t, it’s confusing. People know we generally keep things really tight and we are very rarely out of a game. But we’ve been out of too many this season, too early.
“It is about consistency. They’ve been showing it in training, to be fair, with lots of work and tactical understanding. “But I spoke before the West Ham game about the trust, the trust in yourself, because they do know how to deliver a performance.
“It was about reminding them of the simplicity of it but allowing them to go out and play.” Huddersfield, after their lastminute 1-0 defeat at Fulham on Saturday, are four points adrift at the bottom of the table and manager David Wagner will choose from an unchanged squad. Yesterday they completed the signing of England Under-19 international Jaden Brown, 19, from Tottenham on a free transfer, agreeing a contract until the end of June 2021 with the club holding an option to extend. He will initially join up with Huddersfield’s elite development squad.