Motivation not an issue for Clarets boss

The Clarets are eight points adrift of safety with three games to play, including tomorrow’s trip to Hull City.

A 1-0 defeat at West Ham was a fourth-successive loss, and virtually assured Burnley’s stay in the Premier League will be a brief one.

But Dyche is determined to keep going until his side’s fate is sealed: “That’s easy, the players are motivated, you saw on Saturday there’s no lack of motivation.

“We’ve been searching for moments of quality and more moments of them, but there’s absolutely no lack of motivation, that’s for sure.

“They’ll give whatever they can to myself, the staff and themselves as a team and to the fans. There’s never a lack of that.”

Goals are a problem, however, with Burnley a club record 569 minutes without finding the net, and he admitted: “At any level of football you’ve got to score goals, it comes back to the oldest one in the book, put it in one end and stop it going in the other.

“We’ve generally been pretty good stopping it going in the other, but we haven’t managed to put it in the attacking end as often as we’ve needed to.”

And, again, he defended criticism of his tactical approach over the season: “To be honest it’s a funny one, they’ve been asking me that over the last couple of weeks but the nuances of what we do tactically are things that we do work on.

“It’s mythical almost that they play a 4-4-2, well I think we all know it’s never a straight 4-4-2, there’s flexibility within it so we have adapted it when we’ve needed to.

“But we’ve come across some big teams, Arsene Wenger spoke well of us the other week on the organisation so I’ve never been too worried about the tactics, it is taking chances, and we all know that’s where the truth lies at this level particularly, the higher you go you’ve got to take those chances.”