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Burnley travel to Stamford Bridge tomorrow night to face Chelsea with Sean Dyche looking for a better performance and result than last time he came up against Blues’ boss Maurizio Sarri. That previous encounter came earlier in the season with Chelsea winning 4-0 at the Turf.

Sarri saw his side win through to the semi-finals of the Europa League on Thursday night and hasn’t spoken to the press since his conference at the end of that game when he looked at the situation in the chase for the two remaining Champions League places for next season.

“The last four or five matches will be difficult for every team involved in fighting for the top four, not only for us,” he said. “So we can see some very strange results in the last part of the season. We are going to fight and see at the end.”

Those strange results have seen all three others competing to join Liverpool and Manchester City in the top four all lose over the past two days.

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Dyche takes us back to Chelsea where it all started for us last season. He takes us back this time with only a couple more points needed to be mathematically certain of staying up and he won’t accept our fate until that certainty is with us.

“I deal in facts. That is the currency that I use to keep myself right, ” he said. “If my mind is clear, why wouldn’t I make sure the players’ are, and factually there isn’t anything done yet. People will throw at us the stats and a lot of the background facts, and of course we are aware of all that, but we have made a big marker in my time here of earning everything ourselves and not relying on others. If others do you a favour, so be it, but we want to take control of our own situation. We’ve done that for six and a half years and we have a chance again, over these next four games, starting at Chelsea, to do that.

“When you look at their squad they have some very, very good players. On the other hand, we’ve been competitive pretty much all season, and particularly so in the second half, and we want to continue that.”

He added: “Sometimes you need these teams to have a quiet night, but in balance you need to control the controllables and that means being organised and in the right shape, physically and mentally, to go and take on the challenge.”

Over 1,500 of us will be there tomorrow for the televised game, paying just £10 or less for the tickets on a day when getting there and back has been made very difficult with public transport issues.

Dyche said: “I’ve spoken freely many times about the fact I’m from Kettering and how I support my local team. That’s important, and when you are going away from home it’s an expensive business. It takes effort and it involves time off work, so I think a lot of clubs are trying to do something to help and it’s a great gesture from the club. There’s an understanding that there’s a lot of effort involved, with all of those travel problems factored in, so the subsidy is appropriate in this instance.

“Our fans have travelled all over the place, including Europe, so travelling on the day of a game on a Bank Holiday for an important game, I hope this helps a little. We’ll have good numbers there, and that definitely helps the team. Of course, they will have good memories of last time we were down there and they will equally know it’s a big challenge.”

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