Sean Dyche has insisted that staying at Burnley would not represent a lack of ambition as he is once again linked with Premier League rivals.
Sean Dyche said: “It depends how you measure ambition. People could say sticking at Burnley is not ambitious but the work that has been done here is enormous. The club is a massively different club to the one I walked in to. That is not just down to me obviously, it’s down to lots of people. That’s ambition – to build a club – but it’s a different kind of ambition. People think it’s about just purely trying to go to the top of the game, to win trophies, and of course that’s the name of the game, but there’s more behind that. The number of jobs created here, the feel-good factor around the town, the recognition that the whole town gets here, that’s all ambition too. That’s meant a lot around these parts and I don’t lose sight of that… You can have all the ambition you want but you need the opportunity and I’ve got a good opportunity here to continue with these ambitions, to continue growing this club, and to see where this goes.”
While the exact ambitions of the ownership group who bought Burnley at the turn of the year are not yet clear, there is certainly hope that the club will soon be setting their sights higher than simple survival. Their place in the Premier League for next season was secured with victory at Fulham last Monday, but results at Turf Moor remain disappointing. Asked if he had been working on defending against goalkeepers from corners as a result, Dyche laughed.
Sean Dyche said: “I’d have seen him off, don’t worry about that. It was a great finish though. It’s not that easy when the keeper comes up last minute. I don’t know if you expect (West Brom manager Sam Allardyce) to get his iPad out, ‘Right, we planned on this’. I don’t think the manager can be blamed for that one.”