Sean Dyche - The Times - 'My players softened up'
Posted: Fri Jan 11, 2019 8:14 pm
Sean Dyche interview: After qualifying for Europe, it was like my Burnley players softened up
Oliver Kay, Chief Football Correspondent
January 11 2019, 5:00pm, The Times
Dyche insists that Burnley have tried to recruit from abroad, but usually without success
Legs, hearts, minds. Sean Dyche’s three-word mantra hits you at almost every turn at Burney’s impressive Barnfield Training Complex. It is about the stamina to outrun the opposition, the courage to fight until the final whistle and the intelligence and resilience to face up to any challenge. It is, as the motivational signage suggests, “a way of life”.
It certainly was last season, when Burnley finished seventh in the Premier League, pushing Arsenal hard for a top-six finish until the final weeks of the campaign and securing European qualification for the first time in more than half a century. They held Manchester City at Turf Moor, won at Stamford Bridge and Goodison Park, drew at Old Trafford, Anfield and Wembley. Over their 38-game campaign, they made more blocks and more interceptions than any of their rivals while Jack Cork covered a distance of 288 miles, 13 more than any other player in the Premier League.
“That felt like the perfect storm,” says Dyche, their gregarious manager, looking ahead to Saturday’s crucial match against Fulham. “They were playing at the top level of their game, delivering performances. Demand was high, intent was high, the eye of the tiger — that look in their eye — was a definite. And then . . .”
Let us pause for a moment because the story here is that Burnley, having had the season of their lives, have found life rather more arduous this term. Distracted or drained by their run to the Europa League play-off round, they took just one point from their first five Premier League matches. By the time they were beaten 5-1 at home by Everton on Boxing Day, the halfway point of the Premier League campaign, they had already conceded more goals (41) and suffered more defeats (13) than in the whole of last season. An abrasive, up-and-at-em approach had given way to one that at times seemed to border on the passive, as if legs, hearts and minds were jaded.
Burnley’s turbulent past 12 months — the rise, the regression and now what Dyche feels is the beginnings of a resurgence — has told us much about life in the Premier League. Playing at the peak of their powers last season, they proved to be the best team outside the big six. Without that momentum, without that intensity, without that steely focus, the same group of players struggled badly. Now, after victories over West Ham United and Huddersfield Town in the Premier League, which have taken them out of the relegation zone, and Barnsley in the FA Cup, they look far more like their old selves as they prepare for this weekend’s fixture.
So let us pick up where we left off. And then . . .? “And then life changes,” Dyche says.
Qualification for the Europa League, in which Burnley won two-legged ties against Aberdeen and Istanbul Basaksehir before losing to Olympiacos, proved just as disruptive as Dyche had been warned. “I do understand that reasoning,” he says, “but it was the first time this club had been in Europe for 50-odd years. You’re not going to treat that as a negative. But the games started so early [July 26] so you don’t get a proper pre-season in terms of the work you can fit in. Then you lob in a load of injuries and you’ve got this confusion where we’re thinking, ‘We’re in Europe. Let’s go for that’ and we’re also thinking ‘We’ve got to do that too’, ie the Premier League. There was a lot going on that, for a club like ours and a group of players like ours, wasn’t the norm. It got a bit confused for a while."
It wasn’t just the Europa League campaign, though. “It was the first time a lot of these players had become more recognised, the first time the media had shown a bigger interest, the first time they had had European football to contend with,” the manager says. “To get to that level was a big, big change for everyone. I think it took time for everyone to make sense of it.
“You finish the season, you get a few pats on the back and it’s, like, ‘Right, have we got to do that again?’ Yes we have. Or a version of it. ‘Oh, right. OK. . .’ That’s where the real deal become the real deal; they keep going and going and going relentlessly year after year after year. If that’s where you want to be, beyond life at Burnley, then you’ve got to understand all these demands — possible European demands, possible international demands, the demands of being a more recognised player. Whether that’s contracts, kudos, attention, it all goes into the mix and it takes a bit of getting used to.”
Dyche spoke in these pages last season about the need to retain certain “earthy” qualities — “a strong work ethic, passion, pride, care, attention, honesty, respect” — amid what he called the “glossiness” of the Premier League. Is he suggesting that Burnley’s players, magnificently earthy last season, were seduced by the glossiness? Not exactly, he says, “but whether it’s in sport, business or anything in life, you need that edge. Maybe that edge came off for a time.”
Did the data gathered by Burnley’s sports science department reflect that? “There were some differences, but the main one was the intent, even the body language,” he says. “We have been renowned for that relentlessness, that energy, that look in the eye, to take on everything. It’s that eye of the tiger, which we had shown many times. It wasn’t that it had gone — as you can see from the last few performances — but it was as if it had softened a little bit.
“In that situation, you have to do what good boxers do. They go back to the beginning, back to the gym and they work even harder. We had to say: ‘You have to go and get it. You can’t wait for it.’ The players have been tremendous in saying: ‘Let’s remember what we’re about. Let’s find that edge again.’
“When you’re climbing to achieve something, it’s not easy, but you can see where you’re heading. When you reach a peak, some people look around and say: ‘Right, where’s the next peak for me to climb?’ Others look around and say: ‘Brilliant. This is where I hoped I might get to.’ There’s a human instinct either to keep going or to settle. As a manager, it’s for me to say: ‘Don’t just be happy with that. There’s more out there. Go for whatever you can.’”
One difficulty, perhaps, is the competitive imbalance of the modern Premier League. Frequently in recent years we have seen small-to-medium-sized Premier League clubs — Stoke City, West Bromwich Albion, Swansea City, Southampton — reach a certain level and then, either having changed too much or changed too little, drop alarmingly. Leicester City shattered the Premier League’s glass ceiling in 2016, but three years later they are a mid-table team again and the dominance of the big six seems greater than ever. Ambition can be hard to sustain year after years for clubs where it feels like seventh place, with the dubious prize of the Europa League, is as good as it could possibly get.
“We all know the power of those six clubs is enormous,” Dyche says. “The next fight is to get as close to them as you can, which we did last season. Then it’s ‘Where do we go from here?’ With the model at Burnley, it’s pretty unlikely that I’m going to be told: ‘Here’s hundreds of millions of pounds to spend’. Therefore you’re constantly working to develop and improve, looking for little things that can move you forward.
“We’re in a market where everyone spends fortunes. There are clubs who will take big, big risks on players — a big risk-versus-reward scenario. In the last three transfer windows, our net spend has been roughly £19 million. Brighton’s has been £80 million to £100 million. Huddersfield and Bournemouth similar. Clubs like Wolves and Fulham have come up and had a real go. Cardiff probably spent £40 million last summer. At this club the margins are tighter and we have to be sure as we can possibly be with our recruitment. And the moral of this story is that we’re building by design, not by default, not by throwing money. It still has to be moved forward, but in our world, that isn’t likely to be big jumps forward. It’s going to be inched forward. That’s hard, and it can be frustrating, but equally it can be very rewarding.”
Change the clubs and the numbers in the previous paragraph and this could be Mauricio Pochettino explaining the challenges at Tottenham Hotspur. There are some obvious differences in approach, but Pochettino would relate to that — and indeed to “legs, hearts and minds”.
If there has been a criticism of Dyche, it is that he and Burnley have been too conservative — not just in playing style but in recruitment. From his first-team squad, only the former Belgium midfielder Steven Defour was signed from overseas. The only other players from outside the British Isles are Anders Lindegaard (Denmark), Johann Gudmundsson (Iceland), Matej Vydra (Czech Republic) and Chris Wood (New Zealand), all of whom were already playing in England. In the modern Premier League, that is highly unusual.
“We have been trying to look abroad,” Dyche says. “People might think we haven’t, because we haven’t been able to get certain deals over the line, but we’ve tried. What people perhaps don’t realise is that you have to build a system for that and the chairman and the board have had to decide the right time to back that with finance.
“We’ve recently brought in Mike Rigg, whose job [as technical director] is not so much this transfer window, which is very difficult, but to add to the structures we have. There are clubs out there who have been [recruiting from overseas] for years and are miles ahead in terms of contacts, analysis tools and different ways of working. We have been doing somewhat of it for the last few years, but we have usually gone for homegrown talent of one type or another, where we know the players and the background and we have that expertise about them within our network. We’re now taking that operation to another level, but the rewards of that work are going to take time.
“It’s about finding or developing the next level of player for this club — probably finding and developing — while not undermining the culture we have here, which has been rewarding for all. In terms of playing style, again, it’s trying to morph it slowly into something different. That’s not easy because we’ve still got to win games at the same time. You can’t just say: ‘We’ll have a free season and change everything. No need to worry about results.’ It’s finding that blend — trying to improve, trying to develop, moving it forward. It’s been that way ever since I’ve been here. It’s a big challenge. That doesn’t change.”
Oliver Kay, Chief Football Correspondent
January 11 2019, 5:00pm, The Times
Dyche insists that Burnley have tried to recruit from abroad, but usually without success
Legs, hearts, minds. Sean Dyche’s three-word mantra hits you at almost every turn at Burney’s impressive Barnfield Training Complex. It is about the stamina to outrun the opposition, the courage to fight until the final whistle and the intelligence and resilience to face up to any challenge. It is, as the motivational signage suggests, “a way of life”.
It certainly was last season, when Burnley finished seventh in the Premier League, pushing Arsenal hard for a top-six finish until the final weeks of the campaign and securing European qualification for the first time in more than half a century. They held Manchester City at Turf Moor, won at Stamford Bridge and Goodison Park, drew at Old Trafford, Anfield and Wembley. Over their 38-game campaign, they made more blocks and more interceptions than any of their rivals while Jack Cork covered a distance of 288 miles, 13 more than any other player in the Premier League.
“That felt like the perfect storm,” says Dyche, their gregarious manager, looking ahead to Saturday’s crucial match against Fulham. “They were playing at the top level of their game, delivering performances. Demand was high, intent was high, the eye of the tiger — that look in their eye — was a definite. And then . . .”
Let us pause for a moment because the story here is that Burnley, having had the season of their lives, have found life rather more arduous this term. Distracted or drained by their run to the Europa League play-off round, they took just one point from their first five Premier League matches. By the time they were beaten 5-1 at home by Everton on Boxing Day, the halfway point of the Premier League campaign, they had already conceded more goals (41) and suffered more defeats (13) than in the whole of last season. An abrasive, up-and-at-em approach had given way to one that at times seemed to border on the passive, as if legs, hearts and minds were jaded.
Burnley’s turbulent past 12 months — the rise, the regression and now what Dyche feels is the beginnings of a resurgence — has told us much about life in the Premier League. Playing at the peak of their powers last season, they proved to be the best team outside the big six. Without that momentum, without that intensity, without that steely focus, the same group of players struggled badly. Now, after victories over West Ham United and Huddersfield Town in the Premier League, which have taken them out of the relegation zone, and Barnsley in the FA Cup, they look far more like their old selves as they prepare for this weekend’s fixture.
So let us pick up where we left off. And then . . .? “And then life changes,” Dyche says.
Qualification for the Europa League, in which Burnley won two-legged ties against Aberdeen and Istanbul Basaksehir before losing to Olympiacos, proved just as disruptive as Dyche had been warned. “I do understand that reasoning,” he says, “but it was the first time this club had been in Europe for 50-odd years. You’re not going to treat that as a negative. But the games started so early [July 26] so you don’t get a proper pre-season in terms of the work you can fit in. Then you lob in a load of injuries and you’ve got this confusion where we’re thinking, ‘We’re in Europe. Let’s go for that’ and we’re also thinking ‘We’ve got to do that too’, ie the Premier League. There was a lot going on that, for a club like ours and a group of players like ours, wasn’t the norm. It got a bit confused for a while."
It wasn’t just the Europa League campaign, though. “It was the first time a lot of these players had become more recognised, the first time the media had shown a bigger interest, the first time they had had European football to contend with,” the manager says. “To get to that level was a big, big change for everyone. I think it took time for everyone to make sense of it.
“You finish the season, you get a few pats on the back and it’s, like, ‘Right, have we got to do that again?’ Yes we have. Or a version of it. ‘Oh, right. OK. . .’ That’s where the real deal become the real deal; they keep going and going and going relentlessly year after year after year. If that’s where you want to be, beyond life at Burnley, then you’ve got to understand all these demands — possible European demands, possible international demands, the demands of being a more recognised player. Whether that’s contracts, kudos, attention, it all goes into the mix and it takes a bit of getting used to.”
Dyche spoke in these pages last season about the need to retain certain “earthy” qualities — “a strong work ethic, passion, pride, care, attention, honesty, respect” — amid what he called the “glossiness” of the Premier League. Is he suggesting that Burnley’s players, magnificently earthy last season, were seduced by the glossiness? Not exactly, he says, “but whether it’s in sport, business or anything in life, you need that edge. Maybe that edge came off for a time.”
Did the data gathered by Burnley’s sports science department reflect that? “There were some differences, but the main one was the intent, even the body language,” he says. “We have been renowned for that relentlessness, that energy, that look in the eye, to take on everything. It’s that eye of the tiger, which we had shown many times. It wasn’t that it had gone — as you can see from the last few performances — but it was as if it had softened a little bit.
“In that situation, you have to do what good boxers do. They go back to the beginning, back to the gym and they work even harder. We had to say: ‘You have to go and get it. You can’t wait for it.’ The players have been tremendous in saying: ‘Let’s remember what we’re about. Let’s find that edge again.’
“When you’re climbing to achieve something, it’s not easy, but you can see where you’re heading. When you reach a peak, some people look around and say: ‘Right, where’s the next peak for me to climb?’ Others look around and say: ‘Brilliant. This is where I hoped I might get to.’ There’s a human instinct either to keep going or to settle. As a manager, it’s for me to say: ‘Don’t just be happy with that. There’s more out there. Go for whatever you can.’”
One difficulty, perhaps, is the competitive imbalance of the modern Premier League. Frequently in recent years we have seen small-to-medium-sized Premier League clubs — Stoke City, West Bromwich Albion, Swansea City, Southampton — reach a certain level and then, either having changed too much or changed too little, drop alarmingly. Leicester City shattered the Premier League’s glass ceiling in 2016, but three years later they are a mid-table team again and the dominance of the big six seems greater than ever. Ambition can be hard to sustain year after years for clubs where it feels like seventh place, with the dubious prize of the Europa League, is as good as it could possibly get.
“We all know the power of those six clubs is enormous,” Dyche says. “The next fight is to get as close to them as you can, which we did last season. Then it’s ‘Where do we go from here?’ With the model at Burnley, it’s pretty unlikely that I’m going to be told: ‘Here’s hundreds of millions of pounds to spend’. Therefore you’re constantly working to develop and improve, looking for little things that can move you forward.
“We’re in a market where everyone spends fortunes. There are clubs who will take big, big risks on players — a big risk-versus-reward scenario. In the last three transfer windows, our net spend has been roughly £19 million. Brighton’s has been £80 million to £100 million. Huddersfield and Bournemouth similar. Clubs like Wolves and Fulham have come up and had a real go. Cardiff probably spent £40 million last summer. At this club the margins are tighter and we have to be sure as we can possibly be with our recruitment. And the moral of this story is that we’re building by design, not by default, not by throwing money. It still has to be moved forward, but in our world, that isn’t likely to be big jumps forward. It’s going to be inched forward. That’s hard, and it can be frustrating, but equally it can be very rewarding.”
Change the clubs and the numbers in the previous paragraph and this could be Mauricio Pochettino explaining the challenges at Tottenham Hotspur. There are some obvious differences in approach, but Pochettino would relate to that — and indeed to “legs, hearts and minds”.
If there has been a criticism of Dyche, it is that he and Burnley have been too conservative — not just in playing style but in recruitment. From his first-team squad, only the former Belgium midfielder Steven Defour was signed from overseas. The only other players from outside the British Isles are Anders Lindegaard (Denmark), Johann Gudmundsson (Iceland), Matej Vydra (Czech Republic) and Chris Wood (New Zealand), all of whom were already playing in England. In the modern Premier League, that is highly unusual.
“We have been trying to look abroad,” Dyche says. “People might think we haven’t, because we haven’t been able to get certain deals over the line, but we’ve tried. What people perhaps don’t realise is that you have to build a system for that and the chairman and the board have had to decide the right time to back that with finance.
“We’ve recently brought in Mike Rigg, whose job [as technical director] is not so much this transfer window, which is very difficult, but to add to the structures we have. There are clubs out there who have been [recruiting from overseas] for years and are miles ahead in terms of contacts, analysis tools and different ways of working. We have been doing somewhat of it for the last few years, but we have usually gone for homegrown talent of one type or another, where we know the players and the background and we have that expertise about them within our network. We’re now taking that operation to another level, but the rewards of that work are going to take time.
“It’s about finding or developing the next level of player for this club — probably finding and developing — while not undermining the culture we have here, which has been rewarding for all. In terms of playing style, again, it’s trying to morph it slowly into something different. That’s not easy because we’ve still got to win games at the same time. You can’t just say: ‘We’ll have a free season and change everything. No need to worry about results.’ It’s finding that blend — trying to improve, trying to develop, moving it forward. It’s been that way ever since I’ve been here. It’s a big challenge. That doesn’t change.”
