Gray ban tough to take - Dyche

Burnley shrugged off the first game of Gray's suspension for historic tweets, to beat Watford 2-0 at Turf Moor, with goals from Jeff Hendrick and Michael Keane.

And Dyche spoke for the first time on the subject, after the verdict was delivered on Friday: "He's disappointed, it's an interesting one, we talk about development, about learning, improving, he's a young lad who didn't have any education four years ago, he wasn't worldly wise, and I think he had 50 followers on his Twitter."That's not to do down the comments, I've already made that clear, but that's a fact, and if someone hadn't brought that up, you wouldn't have bothered with it."But I must make it clear, the comments were poor and he's apologised."But it's a tough one to take. He's a resilient character, he's still learning and improving.

"Just to make it clear we of course know the tweet was unacceptable. Andre came out and said that, he apologised and said how far he’d moved forward.

"So it’s fair to say we’re disappointed, very disappointed. Andre misses 12% of our games now.

"It’s a hard one to take, it’s as simple as that, but the decision has been made and we have to get on with it."

But Dyche was delighted with his side's response against the Hornets, who they stopped from extending their record of scoring in every Premier League game so far this season.

Watford had won 4-2 at West Ham and beaten Manchester United 3-1, but were dominated by the Clarets, and Dyche said: "It was close to it (a 90-minute performance) - at the end we got slightly on the back foot, nothing major, but we contained them pretty well, we didn’t find as many passes out of defence, but other than that I was very happy.

"It was a good mixture of quality play, playing into the to third quicker and better than we have been doing, which I emphasised to the players, but also that nice, solid assurance in a good back five performance and if you glue that together with energy and desire it’s a good mixture.

"We’re still taking on the challenge of the Premier League, it’s an adaption phase, it’s not easy to arrive here and just take it on. The players are getting used to each other, Steven (Defour), Jeff (Hendrick) and Johan (Berg Gudmundsson) have just come in and are getting used to the team.

"We still hope for more and we work for more. All of that on top of a big knock this week with Andre so the mentality of the group was very good."