JUST when Sean Dyche thought he was starting to reduce the numbers in the treatment room, he has added his own name to the list.

“I am out for the season!” the Burnley boss said. “I was devastated.”

The Clarets were on only their second day of a warm-weather training trip to Portugal when the manager was struck down by the first thigh injury of his career.

“I’ve ruptured my quad when I was feeding the balls in to training,” he said.

“The physios were telling me when you concentrate on something else and you try to do something physical that split second moment your brain doesn’t lock in to what it needs to do and my quad ruptured, so one of my quad muscles has got no join. It recovers in about 12 weeks.

“I like my running but I can’t run at the minute.

“I’ve had loads of injuries, never anything on my thighs.

“It was only the second day and I had my leg strapped up.

“I fell on the floor when it happened and the lads all laughed and carried on.”

But Dyche says he will happily trade places with the players if it means the numbers in the treatment room start to thin out.

“They’ve got that many injuries that even the manager got injured!” he said, predicting the headlines his tale of woe might make. “It’s a little bit peculiar.

“But I’ll accept the injury as long as they (the players) keep getting fit, and there’s better signs of people getting fit so I’ll take that.”

Burnley’s injured players were included on the mid-season trip, with the exception of Jon Walters who needed to use some training equipment that was unavailable in Portugal.

“We left him here to use that,” said Dyche who hopes the break away has done the squad good.

“We don’t get many windows other than pre-season to get everyone together because often when the internationals come round we’re in a good position now in a sense that a lot of our players are called up for different countries.

“But that doesn’t allow us to get the group to get together very often so when we went out of the cup we thought it was a good window to do that.

“People will link it to that or results but it was always going to be there. We had a chance to get all of the group together including the injured players.

“It was just a nice feel to it for four days.”