You go into each game wanting to perform and wanting to win
Manchester United are here tomorrow and, while all the talk at both clubs has been about transfers, visiting manager Jose Mourinho has switched off from that to concentrate on the game.
By now I think we all thought Henrikh Mkhitaryan would be an Arsenal player with Alexis Sánchez having moved to Old Trafford, but that has not happened yet. “It is not done, not done at all,” said Mourinho. “So, in this moment, Mkhitaryan is our player and Sánchez is an Arsenal player. With a match tomorrow, I want to switch off and focus on the most important thing.”
That led him to speak briefly about Burnley. “They are doing very well,” he said. “You look to the points and the table, they are stable, high in the competition and far from relegation. They play well in their style whether you like or dislike, they’re good at what they do. Especially at home, they are a very difficult opponent.”
What he has done though is manage Burnley, so far, in 99 Premier League games, and the first of those games was against a Chelsea team managed by Jose Mourinho. His record of 27 wins, 26 draws and 46 defeats at a club like ours is a remarkable return, that’s a total of 107 points. With all the changes of manager we get each year, and only 11 remain of the 20 Premier League managers who ended last season, he sits proudly in third place in terms of longest serving behind Arsène Wenger and Eddie Howe, the man he replaced at Burnley.
Speaking about that, he said: “I’m pleased with that and particularly pleased that it’s part of Burnley Football Club. We’ve managed as a group, through dual chairmen when I started and now a single chairman in Mike, the board, two chief executives I’ve worked with, the staff and the players. They have all played a part in getting where we’ve got to.
“It’s not easy to be in the Premier League, for a starter, and then to have 100 games, I’m very pleased with that on behalf of everyone.”
He added: “Winning in the Premier League is a marvellous thing, because it’s not easy to do, and if you win games against the superpower clubs then, of course, it’s a feather in the cap of the club, not myself as manager, but the group and the fans, everyone enjoys that.
“You don’t go into each game hoping for that. You go into each game wanting to perform and wanting to win, no matter who you are playing.”
Much has been said of the fact that we have now gone six Premier League games without a win but Dyche said: “A game and a run can twist very quickly and you have to navigate that. This is the first spell we’ve had. If you look, every single other club, other than the top six and ourselves, have had various spells like we’ve just had.
“Some, who are struggling a little bit down at the bottom, have had three or four spells. That’s how difficult the Premier League is. To think we weren’t going to have one all season is highly unlikely and improbable.
“You want to guard against that and you want to have a spell where you are having results all the time, but it’s very difficult in the Premier League and that’s why I look beyond that and say you’ve got to have everything in context.
“You’ve got to have your injuries, suspensions, the opposition, you’ve got to have decisions. You have to have it all in the same pot and then make a view of it. That doesn’t mean you accept it, but there has to be a bigger picture view. The margins are so narrow.
“When we had a really good run I said the margins were tight and we were on the right side of them. We’ve been on the right side of them a lot. We want to get back to doing that.”
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