Going down not an option for Burnley veteran Alexander (From Lancashire Telegraph)

Going down not an option for Burnley veteran Alexander

3:00pm Friday 12th March 2010 in

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DURING a season in which Portsmouth have almost gone to the wall, Manchester United have announced debts of £716million and three top flight clubs have borrowed against next season’s television income, small spending, debt-free Burnley are being celebrated as a shining example of how a football club should be run.

But the Clarets’ Premier League prudence has been interpreted by some as an acceptance of a fate predicted at the start of the season; that their dalliance with football’s elite would be short-lived and a return to the Championship inevitable.

Graham Alexander doesn’t buy that at all.

Such a view is nothing short of a gross misconception in the Scotland international’s eyes.

He is more concerned with team sheets, score sheets and clean sheets than balance sheets.

“I can’t speak for anyone else but the players haven’t accepted it,” said the former Preston stalwart when the theory was posed that, should Burnley go down, it wouldn’t be the end of the world because they haven’t spent big to try to stay up.

“We realise the constraints the club have got with the financial situation but that’s nothing to do with us.

“We wanted to fight to get here, we’ve got here and now we’ve got to prove we’re good enough to stay here.

“The lads aren’t thinking it will be okay if we get relegated at all.

“We’re fighting for every point and we’re going to do that right to the wire.”

As far as he is concerned, their doubters have been proved wrong already, and they can do it again.

“We were written off at the start of the season, that we wouldn’t win a game and finished with the lowest points,” he continued.

"We've shown people we can win, so we've just got to keep proving people wrong use that to keep the fire in the belly going.

"There's definitely enough ability and definitely enough strength in the mind to get the wins we need to stay up.”

Alexander has never been here before. In his one and only relegation season - his first at Luton in 1995/96 - the Hatters went down with barely a whimper, finishing bottom of the modern-day Championship seven points and a vast goal difference away from safety.

This time it’s different.

A win over Wolves tomorrow will ease Burnley out of the bottom three for the first time in over a month, and having waited his whole footballing life to get to the promised land, Alexander isn’t going to let the chance to stay there pass him, or his team-mates, by.

"I have been involved in relegation battles before and it's tough. But you have to deal with it,” said the 38-year-old.

"It's the same pressure at the top in that you need to win games as well "It is a similar sort of pressure you have to win games to get what you want. That's where we are now.

"Sometimes not being involved in a relegation before can be a positive because there is a naivety about you when you are not winning games.

"I don't know the history of all the lads in the team but there are a lot of experienced lads in there.

"If you have played ten years of football I doubt you would have had ten years of promotion campaigns. They will have had a couple of scraps here and there.

“The younger lads may look to the experienced lads for a bit of guidance and we give them that. The older lads can bounce off the younger lads in terms of how positive they are and how naive they are to the realities of football. There is a good balance in there.”

With 11 first teamers out of contract this summer, the prospect of a new deal provides another incentive to achieve.

But Alexander believes the players are giving their all regardless.

“I think the lads are honest as the day is long and I don't think they'll put in any more effort than they would have done anyway whether they've got a contract or not,” he said.

"I obviously can't speak for everyone's mentality, but from what I've seen I know the effort the lads put in for training and for games and I don't think they could put any more in if they had a contract or not.

"I don't think that has any bearing on the results we're getting.”