Its a bitter pill to swallow

Burley considered it a patchy display but balanced it up with their recent defeat at Ipswich. “I said things even themselves out over the season and recently we went to Ipswich and played them off the park and got nothing. Today, we didn't play particularly well but we got all three points which is all that matters.

“If I was Steve Cotterill I would be very disappointed to lose the game because they gave us problems and they are a decent side causing us problems at the back. Their strikers were backing into us and we have to learn to deal with that. Pele has come from Portugal where he is not used to that and he has to learn how to handle it.”

Looking at his team's performance, Burley added: “We didn't start well, our passing went astray too often and we were a bit narrow and we were defensively poor in the first half. But even when we are not playing well we have people who can score goals and we got three crackers today.

“That is something I felt we lacked last season but Greg did it for me at Derby while Rudi did it for me at Hearts. We had three tremendous finishes to win us the match even though I was not particularly happy with the overall performance. As a manager I suppose you are always looking for the perfect performance and we did not play at our best but the quality of our goals was top class.”

It was obvious what Steve Cotterill was going to be first asked after the game, it was always going to be for his comments on his captain Wayne Thomas following the defenders red card early in the game with the Clarets leading 1-0.

And Steve didn't shirk it. “A moment of unthinkable stupidity from one our players has cost us three points today because we were the better team, and they knew it. I think Wayne Thomas is guilty, their lad might have made more of a meal of it, holding his face, because he wasn't barged there. But at the end of the day I wouldn't blame him for going down, and that stupidity from Thomas has cost us.”

Asked if he would be taking any further action against his captain, possibly stripping him of the captaincy, he added: “It's a thought, but at the moment it is only a thought and I will sleep on that one,” and commenting on how he normally defends his players he said: “Nine times out of ten I stick up for my players, but today I can't do that because you will then think I'm an idiot.”

On the performance itself he said: “Even when we went down to ten men I think we showed great bravery and courage to get to 2-1 up and there was a fantastic result there for us. I am convinced we would have got it but for that incident.

“Even with ten men I thought we at least deserved a draw, but you can't afford to play Southampton with ten men for so long, even though we were good enough for a result – and it is really, really disappointing and its a bitter pill to swallow.”