Paul Sturrock had seen his side play seven games without even scoring a goal but was delighted to see that, and the run of poor results come to an end as they collected all three points on the last day of the year.
“I’m very pleased,” he said. “For an hour I thought we were excellent and did all the right things.
Talking about the long run without a goal he added, “I’m glad we’ve got that out of the way. Our first hurdle was to get a goal and it settled us down. Then you are hoping for a second one to give you some breathing space. We’ve been kicked in the teeth so many times and this had all the ingredients of the same thing again.
“When you are in the position in the league that we are in you get very apprehensive. It finished up like the
“Hopefully we can build from this now. We have to try and drag as many teams into our area of the league as we can.”
Paul Sturrock may well have been delighted but Burnley manager Steve Cotterill certainly wasn’t, after seeing his side go down to defeat for the second time in three days and after the game he said, “It was a disappointing way to end the year and you can’t expect to play for thirty minutes and win a game. We had too many players who didn’t turn up for an hour today and that is not like us.
“For thirty minutes, I don’t think their back four were out of the eighteen yard box but you’ve got to give them credit. They have come here today and out fought us and out scrapped us and that is so unlike us because we don’t normally lose those sort of contests.
“For an hour we were second best and we know that, although it doesn’t happen very often. It is tough for us, but the one thing we are not going to do is complain about weary legs because it is the same for everybody and they came here and out fought us, that is the bottom line.
“We didn’t have enough players in our dressing room that wanted to win that game and that was probably typified with that scramble in their box. They got a toe to it twice and we didn’t.”
Having witnessed those closing stages he added, “We could have had a draw and if we had turned up for the first hour we would not have found ourselves in that situation. We could have gone on and won the game.
“From 2-0 down it is unbelievably hard and we did it in the last game at
Looking forward to the trip to QPR on Monday, Steve worked out how it could be that bit easier and joked, “Hopefully their game against Crewe will be end to end and then there are thirty minutes of added time when it is end to end again and then Ollie [Ian Holloway] takes his boys out for a New Year drink, but it probably won’t happen.”
And then added, “We’d like to get a result there on Monday, but I’m sure QPR will have something to say about that.”