Kilby confident Burnley will stay up

Five years ago, Burnley broke the club record to land striker Steven Fletcher for £3m, while adding the likes of Andre Bikey (£1.8m), David Edgar (£300,000), Richard Eckersley (£500,000), Brian Easton (£350,000), and, in the January window, Leon Cort (£1.5m) and Danny Fox (£1.5m).

The windfall has roughly doubled from 2009 - with promotion then worth around £60m - and, having had that experience for the first time, Kilby expects the club to be better prepared.

Still a board member after stepping down as chairman in the summer of 2012, Kilby’s legacy was of not “betting the ranch”, but he said: “It depends where you spend it in a sense and just what type of players that you buy.

“But I still think we’ve got more to play with than last time.

“I think we’ve got a plan that’s emerging, what we want to try to do, the type of players we want to try to get and hopefully we can do it.”

Burnley finished with 30 points last time out, having taken only four away from home all season - and losing manager Owen Coyle halfway through the campaign tore out the club’s heart.

But Kilby is confident the Clarets can prosper this time around: “Obviously you’d like to think we can do better.

“I did watch Liverpool and Chelsea last Sunday and thought ‘oh my goodness!’.

“We will be competing with these guys, but I’m sure we’ll be well equipped and we’ll have a plan.

“Even through going up at the end of the season rather than in the play-off final, I think gives you a little bit of an edge to wheel and deal and do things in May, which was denied us last time. So I think we’ve got a little quiet optimism about ourselves and we will acquit ourselves well, and stay in the division.

“We all know what happened during the season as well, which disrupted things and makes it all disjointed in my own mind.

“But it’s the experience and a little bit of know-how this time of just what we’re getting into, rather than going into the unknown like last time.”

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