Burnley boss Sean Dyche: English managers are just as good as foreign bosses

SEAN DYCHE is ready to fly the flag for English managers when the new Premier League season kicks off.

But he doesn’t believe the dwindling number of homegrown coaching talent is getting the credit it deserves in the face of the growing influence of overseas managers.

The Burnley boss is one of only three English managers operating in the top flight, alongside Crystal Palace’s Alan Pardew and his predecessor at Turf Moor, Bournemouth’s Eddie Howe.

The arrival this summer of Pep Guardiola at Manchester City and Antonio Conte at Chelsea has added to the foreign flair factor, but Dyche fears the image being portrayed of the high-profile imports sometimes comes at the expense of the work being done by British bosses.

“Conte got commended for bringing a hard, fast, new leadership to Chelsea, which involved doing 800m runs, 400m runs and 200m runs,” said Dyche.

“Come to my training and see Sean Dyche doing that and you’d say, ‘Dinosaur, a young English dinosaur manager, hasn’t got a clue’.

“Perception is radically different to what is going on with young English managers. I just saw Gael Clichy talking about the diet that Pep has brought in. He’s stopped pizza. Nasri was talking about how this new diet was amazing, saying we don’t eat junk food.

“We’ve been doing that since I got here. I did it at Watford, so are other English managers. Because I’m Sean Dyche you wouldn’t be interested. It’s ‘Go on Pep, tell us about your pizzas’.

“They questioned me playing a 4-4-2 and then everyone played it last year and it was, ‘Amazing Ranieri, amazing, tactical genius’.

“Klopp came in and played sort of a 4-4-2 and ‘let’s run really hard and press’. People thought it was incredible. Wasn’t Sean Dyche doing that three years ago when he got here?

“Pochettino is fantastic. I really enjoy his company. Wenger was very good with me, very good company.

“There’s no problem with me and foreign managers, but generally there is still this edge towards foreign coaches and managers.”

As well as the newcomers, Dyche will also lock horns with Wenger, Pochettinio, Jose Mourinho, Ronald Koeman and title-winner Ranieri after Burnley kick off their campaign at home to Swansea on Saturday.

The former Watford boss will be up against it as he looks to keep Burnley up after leading them to promotion for the second time in three seasons.

The Clarets will again be working with the smallest budget in the Premier League but Dyche insists he won’t be dazzled by the men he is up against as he looks to take on the big boys.

He added: “I don’t judge myself against Pep Guardiola with what their squad is. It’s not a level playing field. 

“There’s that weird thing about pitting your wits against them. I’m not really. If we had equal squads, that’d be pitting my wits against them. 

“There’s massive gaps throughout the Premier League. It’s not interesting for me to go, ‘Oh look, there’s that famous manager, yeah he’s been doing this and that’. It never even crosses my mind. We just take the game on and see what it gets. Afterwards we’ll say hello and off we go. Simple as that.

“I can assure you the schmoozing stuff is not something I over-think. I have total respect to the man stood next to me – some have done amazing things in the game – but I don’t think about it.

“We’re probably out there on our own in that we’re that anomaly club. There’s nobody in the Premier League in the situation we were in two years ago, let alone now.

“Arguably there will be no one spending as little as we spend and if they aren’t spending it this year they spent it the year before or the year before that. And we’ll have by far the lowest wage bill.

“But there’s a big belief in what we do, there’s a big belief in the players, and we’ve earned the right to be there.

“We’ll take all the bad news, all the doubters, take it all on and just go out and see, because the only real truth in football is out there and on the training ground. The rest is opinion and fake. The bit I focus on and the players focus is out there.

“We know about it, everyone writes us off. So what? We don’t write ourselves off.”