Dyche: Burnley will be ready

The Clarets bowed out of the top flight with a 1-0 win at Aston Villa on Sunday, confirming a 19th-place finish, as Danny Ings fired his 11th goal of the season, and Tom Heaton kept a 10th clean sheet.

And Dyche is already plotting a return, as he again brushed off speculation about his future: “People keep coming up to me ‘oh, you’re leaving!’, I don’t know where that’s come from.

“I’ve never said it once, I’m quite happy here.

“I believe in what the club have built, what we can build and we can move it forward. I believe there’s many changes we can still make, many things we’ve learned, so I just crack on, simple as that.”

And he wants another taste of the Premier League with Burnley: “I think the Championship is a tough division, we’ve come out of it once. The fans know as well, they’ve enjoyed the reality we’ve brought, and there’s no guarantees.

“We’re going to have to work very hard, recruit well, organise well and add in all the things we’ve learned from this level. It is a different game. The mindset has to stay the same, but the game changes slightly and you have to be ready for it, and we will be.

“The fans know how hard we had to work last time, they won’t think you just turn up and win every week. We only lost five games last time, but that’s very low for a team that gets promoted.

“I think our fans are reality-bound, they’ve absorbed the messages and know this business is tough.

“They’ve had a couple of great years and want more, but we want more as well.”

“It looks that way, there’s no guarantee, but I was on him for not getting a second. The demanding high, and they’re the demands you should be under.

Burnley will have to try and bounce back without Danny Ings, who confirmed the worst-kept secret in football, saying after the game he had played his last match for the club: “It was quite an emotional day for me.

“I think everybody knows what’s been going on off the pitch and I wanted to finish my last game here in style.

“I’m just over the moon that I managed to get the winning goal in front of all the fans that travelled.”

Dyche, asked whether he will stay, admitted: “It’s probabilities and possibilities, probably not, just by the nature of his situation, but possibly, who knows?

“I don’t think he’s thirsty to go anywhere, I just think he wants a fresh challenge and a new challenge, and certainly wants to be in the Premier League, but so does everyone.

“We all want to be in the Premier League, because you want to work at the top level, so we’ll see.

“He’s nicked a good goal, could have had another, and he’s played a massive part over a couple of years.

“Among many others though. He gets a lot of the headlines, and we understand that, goal scorers always do, but I wouldn’t single him out overly from the rest of the group because there’s some players who have matured, and people will be saying ‘they’ve got some good players there’.

“They’ve put themselves on the map, with the team.

“If it’s going to go wrong in the sense we didn’t stay in the Premier League, you’ve got to do it right, and I think we did, we just fell short on the margins.”

Asked if he would have done anything differently this season, Dyche added: “There’s a load of different things, you learn a lot from being in the Premier League, but I’m going to keep them to myself, because when you get back in there, I’ll have to use them.”