We are up there for a reason
Burnley travel to Birmingham tomorrow to face a team that could well see some young players included as manager Gary Rowett looks to give some of them game time before the end of the season.
Accepting that he’ll only play them if he feels they are ready, he said: “It’s always hard. I know what I would like to do and know what I would like to see.
“The most difficult bit with that is you are playing probably the best team, on form, in the division. You have to look at can we be competitive. We want to try and win the game. To be radically experimental there’s a point where you have to say ‘OK it doesn’t matter if we lose the last five games of the season if we learn lessons’.
“As a manager that’s always hard to do that. I don’t want to lose any game, and it hurts. I stayed over in Birmingham on Tuesday night. I am sat in the hotel and I am annoyed and frustrated, almost depressed. Then I wake up the next morning and I am ready to go again to try and enthuse people, that’s what the job is about.
“There will be a point where I have to do one or two things but I think at this moment my focus is really on winning more than one game in five. I know there are other teams in the same boat. You look at Hull, they have got a fantastic squad of players, a terrific manager and they have won one game in eight. It’s not easy at this stage of the season. We want to win some games. We want to finish strongly.
“When I hear a few names being bandied around, some of the names viewed in under-21 football, and some of the players wouldn’t be ready to play first team football yet. I am absolutely convinced of that.
“But I think there are one or two who are ready. I think Charlee Adams is probably ready, certainly Viv (Solomon-Otabor) is ready and it would be nice at some point to get those two on the pitch, maybe from the start in one or two of the last five games.”
It’s different for Burnley right now. We are still chasing a promotion and Sean Dyche takes what he describes as a fully focused squad to Birmingham.
“Nothing comes easy in football,” he said. “You have to fight for the right for everything you get and we certainly haven’t been given the position we’re in on a plate. Equally, you don’t define your season by everyone else’s. We have to stay focused on what we do an we’ve done that well this season.
“It’s not too long ago, at Christmas, that people were questioning whether we would be play-off contenders or not. Then we got into the play-offs and they wondered if we could challenge. Now we are challenging and there are still questions. That’s how football is.
“We ask our own questions, but we are up there for a reason and we are challenging for a reason, so whatever happens to the other teams it still comes down to what we do and we are going to have to deliver everything we can in the coming games.
“There’s a good demand from inside the camp here. We know where we are going and what we want to achieve and there is a clarity about what we have to do to go and get that.”
The Burnley squad has plenty of experience and the manager added: “Experience gives you a helping hand and this is something that’s not new to many of the squad. At lot of them have been down this road before and that’s an added tool in the box to help you on your way. We’ve been down this road before and we know what we were looking for and expecting this season, and we’re right on plan.”
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