With a key goalscorer fit again, Sean Dyche and Burnley are starting to reap rewards for sticking to their philosophies through a barren ten match run at the start of the season.
The problem with QPR’s method of trying to solve every problem by making another signing, coupled with a desire to bring big-names into the club to satisfy it’s purpose as an advertising brand builder for the Tune Group, is that newly promoted teams struggle to attract the best players at the best of times. When you couple that with the lack of infrastructure, training facilities, size of the stadium, recent history and likelihood of an immediate relegation the problem is exacerbated.
It means to get big-name players you have to pay crippling wages, and take players who’ve got something a bit wrong with them — age, attitude, fitness or a combination of the three. It’s a lesson Rangers learnt the harsh way two seasons ago when the liked of Ji-Sung Park and Jose Bosingwa blew up in the club’s face. While signings like Jordon Mutch and Steven Caulker — where the ‘something wrong with them’ bit is a recent relegation with another team — suggest they’ve taken heed, Rio Ferdinand still managed to sneak in and start selling his chuffing baseball caps in the club shop over the summer.
If Burnley adopted the same policy, they’d find the going even tougher still. QPR have the pull of London for foreign players, and haven’t had any trouble in the past lashing out ludicrous wages on players. Burnley is a remote town of 90,000 people right up in the north west, more than 25 miles on country roads from the nearest big city Manchester. The Clarets have a stringent wage bill based around keeping the club financially stable should the worst happen. You’d be hard pushed to get Eduardo Vargas here.
So they haven’t. Partly through common sense and partly through having no option, Burnley have spent a minimal amount of money and refused to get drawn into gun slinging and dick swinging over wages. The team they’re operating with is largely the side that shocked the Championship by winning promotion last season when many had tipped it to be relegated and with Danny Ings fit again they’ve won two and drawn two of their last four prior to this fixture having failed to win any of the first ten without him.
It’s all making rather a star of gruff-talking, forward-thinking manager Sean Dyche. One wonders why he was allowed to sit in the Soccer Saturday studio for quite so long after a harsh sacking by Watford, which was more to do with new owners wanting their own man than any commentary on the fine job he’d done in difficult circumstances at Vicarage Road. Burnley are reaping the rewards of giving him another shot at management and will surely have to fend off interest in his services from elsewhere once that merry-go-round kicks into gear.
Dyche’s career from here will be intriguing. Burnley got to the Premier League against the odds once before and the manager who did it for them, Owen Coyle, was hot property as a result. He went to Bolton citing their greater spending power and relegated them heavily in debt. Dyche seems to buy into the Burnley ethos, and indeed further it through his own input, a good deal more than that but it will be interesting to see if he can sustain success here and/or achieve it elsewhere.
Quite what success for Burnley is remains unclear. Yo yoing up and down a few times, collecting the money and investing in infrastructure to eventually become a settled Premier League side, as West Brom did previously, seems to be the aim. But if they went down and stayed down financially secure would that be a failure? They may yet stay up this season, which would be a remarkable achievement.
If Burnley were to survive at QPR’s expense it would only increase the amount of fans in W12 who say they would rather their club was run like Burnley, in a sustainable way, refusing to cough up the big wages and chase the big name players. But then again, I’d hate to have been moderating QPR message boards over the summer if the only signings Harry Redknapp made after promotion were Lukus Jutkiewicz, Steven Reid and George Boyd.
Still, the idea of coaching players you already own, fostering a strong work ethic and team spirit, and investing in infrastructure rather than a clutch of new players every transfer window does sound appealing after five or six tumultuous years at Loftus Road. And Burnley are showing it’s not just a worthy strategy doomed to failure, they’re right in the mix with everybody else and have another key striker, Sam Vokes, about to return to the side as well.
Expect Burnley to press as a unit, trying to close space for QPR to work in. It would be unlike them to sit back, even if they would take a point if offered. Rangers will have to match them for work rate as well as remaining composed enough to pass or hoof their way around the high-energy opposition they’ll face here.
Right back Kieran Trippier is a particularly key man — 14 assists and two goals in 46 appearances at full back last season testify to that. Mee, who I have always liked the look of as well, chipped in with three assists from the other side last season too so watch out for the attacking runs from full backs.
QPR have been exposed on the flanks of late, preferring to choose Leroy Fer and Niko Kranjcar on the wings for their attacking abilities while knowing they’re not crash hot at tracking back. That could be particularly dangerous here with Trippier about.
Alternatively you could look at it as trying to pen him back and keep him occupied by playing on the front foot — Trippier didn’t look overly comfortable defensively when this fixture finished 3-3 here back in February. We’ll see.
At the heart of the defence, ten-year Burnley veteran Michael Duff and Jason Shackell will likely be paired in front of former QPR loanee goalkeeper Tom Heaton — the same back five that carried them out of the Championship last season. Burnley conceded just 14 goals at home last year and kept 11 clean sheets including one against QPR in a 2-0 victory.
Burnley have been using former Brighton man Ashley Barnes alongside Ings in attack, with Jutkiewicz coming off the bench in the continued absence of Sam Vokes.
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