We want to finish on a good note

"We were doing okay before the sending off but there were a few decisions like that and the people at Sky tell me that Burnley's first goal was offside," he said, although making no reference to the fact that Nathan Ellington handled the ball as he gave his side an early 2-0 lead.

Although not having had the chance to take a second look at the sending off incident he added: "The sending off was disappointing because, if you know McShane, there is not a player with more honesty in the game. Whilst I haven't seen the incident, I'm pretty he was watching the ball and intended to head it.

"There would have been no malice about it. The referee got it wrong and we will appeal. I train with McShane every day. He hasn't got a bad bone in his body.

"I explained to the referee at half time he should know his footballers. It is part of his job to know who is capable of hurting someone. McShane is not that sort of lad, but the referee seemed a bit sharp to me. He had his red card out before the ball had bounced. But the result is in the history books now and we have to get on with it."

On his lack of defenders he said: "Chris Perry did fine. He's a decent footballer and is a good defender, but the bottom line is it is pretty hard to defend the box when you are missing four first choice centre halves. Sam Sodje wasn't ready today and we'll have to see if he's ready for the weekend."

West Brom must be the only side who have four first choice centre halves, I can't imagine how he fits them all into the side at the same time. Meanwhile it is worth nothing that at no point did he express any concern for James O'Connor.

Steve Cotterill was far from happy with the opening minutes of the game but more than pleased with the way his side fought back to win the game. "We showed an awful lot of character coming back," he said. "I think we had done well against eleven men after eight minutes, but I don't know what it was about those first eight minutes.

"We have to start being better against teams like West Brom. We didn't do any of the things we talked about or watched on video, and we should never have given them the respect we did. We spoke about how to deal with Jason Koumas coming off the line and how to stop him making those runs.

"I was really disappointed with that, but afterwards we deserve an enormous amount of credit for getting back into the game, even with them having ten men. We had to be calculated in what we did and it is an unbelievable win really."

Commenting on our first goal he said: "I thought Andy was offside from where I was stood, and that's without seeing it on camera, but I thought Michael Duff epitomised what I like my teams to do and to be fair there was no room for error in him winning that ball, otherwise it could have been 3-0.

"At half time we said we wanted to keep the tempo high. We were going to play 2-4-4 to make sure we pushed right up and had the ball out of the back.

And if that didn't come off after twenty minutes we were going to switch to play 3-4-3. They knew who would come off and exactly how we were going to play. And the 4-4-2 worked."

There are no relegation fears now and Steve is checking our points total against previous seasons. "It is better than last year and that's the first hurdle, but we need another three points to make sure we are above my first year in a league that is better two years on. We want to finish on a good note now and that is in the forefront of my mind."