Andrew Greaves column: Burnley need to find some more fluidity

The performance on Sunday in front of the TV cameras was a little flat, I’ll admit, but it’s certainly not the time to worry.

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Southampton, as I said last week, posed a completely different threat to anything else we’d faced this season and Sean Dyche was right to admit we were second best on the south coast.

That man Charlie Austin – he used to build walls you know – was our undoing but the most frustrating thing is that the game could have been so much different had another decision gone our way.

I’m not one to bang on about referees but I just knew it was going to be one of those days when I saw that Mike Dean had been handed this match. Add in a TV audience and you’re asking for trouble!

How he missed the blatant penalty appeal in the first half – when Virgil van Dijk turned his back into Johann Berg Gudmundsson and sent him sprawling in the area I’ll never know.

It was as blatant a penalty as you will see all day.

There are no guarantees that we would have scored or that the decision would have changed the course of the game but for a side who has struggled to score on the road it would have been a timely shot in the arm.

Instead we were undone after the break with two strikes from Austin and one from the impressive Nathan Redmond before Sam Vokes pulled one back from spot (and from a penalty which looked less of a foul than the one in the first half!).

Everton at home on Saturday is another big test and the Toffees have been in fine form under Ronald Koeman this term.

A credible 1-1 draw at Manchester City last time out will have done wonders for their confidence and we will, once again, have to be at our best to get anything from a tough game.

We need to stop giving away scrappy goals and try and find some fluidity to our play again.

The performances against Watford and Arsenal were much more of what we are about and if we are to survive, we need to start making Turf Moor the fortress we know it can be.