We have to go and take care of ourselves
Burnley travel to Sunderland tomorrow with the Clarets once again coming up against David Moyes who has been with the Wearside club since last summer.
Moyes’ side are currently in bottom place but see tomorrow as an opportunity to get points against the Clarets who have the worst away record in the league.
“We have to make sure it (our away record) doesn’t turn,” Moyes said in the pre-match press conference. “We have to make sure we’re the team doing everything they can to get the three points.
“Burnley have been a tough opposition for lots of teams this year; they’re well drilled and they’ve been together as a team for a number of years now, so that gives them an advantage, but we have to try and get something from the game. That is really important.
“We need to score more goals and make more chances, but in the same breath we need to make sure we don’t concede and give ourselves too much to do.
“We learnt in the first game (against Burnley) that if we can’t cope physically we’re going to have a problem, and we’re going to have a problem if we can’t compete for second balls and defend set pieces. Those are the fundamental things we have to do before we start talking about tactics or how we’re going to do things. We have to deal with them.”
Sean Dyche will come up against Sunderland for the fourth time since Christmas. He said: “We’ve delivered some good performances (against Sunderland). We don’t look too much at the past because we want to guarantee the future, or look to guarantee.
“We’ve delivered good performances generally of late. I didn’t think we were as good against Swansea but I thought we were very good at Anfield last week and that’s a big place to go to and I thought we delivered a very good performance there so obviously we want to take that thinking into the next game at Sunderland.
“We didn’t get anything from Anfield last week but the performance was very good and that shows signs of strength away from home. I think there’s a good mentality. There’s certainly a very good tactical framework for the players to work from and it was a couple of soft moments for us which cost us, but that’s the sort of performance level I want from the team because if we get that right on a continued basis then I think we’ll certainly be looking after ourselves.”
He added: “We’re in good shape as a group. The team are and I think the performances generally are. I think it bodes well but we have got to take care of ourselves of course and the next one’s Sunderland.”
Asked about what sort of points total we might be looking at, he suggested that, as always, it is one game at a time. “It’s served us well,” he said. “It’s another of my broken record statements but it’s because I believe in it. We’ve worked that way for a long time here.
“That clarity with each performance as it comes and we keep taking steps forward from each performance. We keep learning from it, readjusting, trying to move forward. There are different things that we take from each game that we add into the next one, to add into a performance and then go and look to get what we want from each game.”
Sunderland go into tomorrow’s game clearly looking for a much needed win. “It’s different from their point of view,” Dyche added. “Obviously we want to take three points from every game but for them I think there’ll be a lot of expectation there. We haven’t won away and they’ll be expecting their team to win.
“We go there with clarity in the sense of our performances. We have to go and take care of ourselves and that’s what we’ll look to do.”
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