'˜We're out on our own' '“ Dyche

But he has great belief in what he and his players are about, and insists they deserve their place at the top table.

Burnley open their campaign at home to Swansea City tomorrow (kick-off 3 p.m.), widely backed for a third relegation from the Premier League.

Dyche is determined to make people rethink their opinions: “I think we’re probably out there on our own in that we’re that anomaly club.

“We were two years ago, nobody gives you a chance – that can be helpful in a weird kind of way.

“We’re quite singular in that sense. There’s nobody in the Premier League in the situation we were in two years ago, let alone now.

“Arguably there will be no one spending as little as we spend, and if they aren’t spending it this year, they spent it the year before or the year before that, and we’ll have by far the lowest wage bill.

“But there’s a big belief in what we do, there’s a big belief in the players, and we’ve earned the right to be there.

“We’ll take all the bad news, all the doubters, take it all on and just go out and see, because the only real truth in football is out there and on the training ground.

“The rest is opinion and fake. We know about it, everyone writes us off, so what, we don’t write ourselves off.”

Burnley were relegated two seasons ago, having failed to win any of their first 10 league games, and, asked what he learned from that campaign, Dyche noted: “What I liked, home and away we took every game on.

“Now people will say you shouldn’t have, you should have played 4-5-1 and dropped to the edge of your box.

“But you’ve got to know what suits your players.

“I want my players to go out and grip it, not wait and hope. I want them to go out knowing they have no regrets.

“That’s the way I work, it’s served us more than well in the Championship to get us where we’ve got to.

“Adjusting it is often the quality of player and quality of understanding of the players.

“But if we went and attempted to do what everyone else does in the Premier League, they’d be better at it than us – they’ve been doing it for years, simple as that.

“So twist and tweak, and broadly, base our play on what we do. That will probably be more effective than trying to change it to what everyone else does.

“I always play to win, I’ve never thought about what we can do to draw, it’s not my bag.

“We plan on winning, that’s the belief I have.”

And he won’t be judging himself against some of the biggest managerial names in the world: “It’s not reality because there’s no balance to it. I don’t judge myself against Pep Guardiola with what their squad is – it’s not a level playing field.

“We just take the game on and see what it gets. Afterwards we’ll say hello and off we go. Simple as that.”