SEAN Dyche said any hopes of bringing Troy Deeney to Burnley were ended by the Watford striker’s price tag, but admitted he had his own ‘rough diamond’ at Turf Moor in Andre Gray.

Both Gray and Deeney have worked their way to the Premier League through the lower leagues and via brushes with the law.

Dyche can see similarities between the pair in their battle to reach the top, although he believes the 28-year-old Hornets captain and Gray are very different strikers on the pitch.

The Burnley boss worked with Deeney during his time in charge at Vicarage Road and the Clarets were linked with a move for him at the start of their last Premier League season in 2014/15.

“As soon as they said ‘this amount of money’, it went straight out of my thinking,” Dyche said of his interest in Deeney. “We’re at Burnley and money is not easy to come by here.

“He knows the respect I have for him, I still do, I still send him the odd text saying ‘well done’ and things like that and he’s a very good player.”

Deeney was sentenced to 10 months in prison for affray in 2012, but is a reformed character since then, while Gray has admitted his own troubles with gangs and was stabbed on a night out in Wolverhampton while with non-league Hinckley United, but he has also put those troubles behind him.

On the similarities between the two strikers, Dyche said: “Pathway a little bit, not similarities as players I don’t think, but they’ve both had to earn the right and both worked very hard.

“They were both rough diamonds. They have similar, but different backgrounds, they both had challenges as younger men and came through them and continue to develop.

“They’re not tactically the same and not the same make-up as players but their backgrounds and pathways are similar.”

Dyche believes his first-team coach Tony Loughlin and assistant manager Ian Woan, who moved with him from Watford to Burnley, deserve a lot of credit for Deeney’s development in recent seasons for the work they did with him on the training ground.

And the Clarets chief remembers the moment he realised Deeney was ready to become the main man at Vicarage Road.

“I’ll never forgot we were at a very small fan’s forum and we had a panel. We’d just sold Marvin Sordell and someone said, ‘Who is going to score the goals?’. Troy was sat next to me and I looked at him and he just said ‘me’,” remembers Dyche.

“There was something in that moment, it was like the penny dropped internally, the way he said it. It sounds crazy but there was something in the way he conducted himself at the moment and he never looked back.”

Deeney made his first jump to the Premier League at the start of last season with Watford and his penalty against Manchester United last week was his 15th top flight goal.

Gray is in his first season at the top and he has one top flight goal to his name so far, having scored in the win over Liverpool, but will now miss the next four games through his suspension for historic offensive social media posts.

While Dyche is happy if Gray wants to take inspiration from Deeney, he wants to see the 25-year-old plot his own path forward.

“Andre’s challenge is to be him,” said the Clarets chief. “It’s not to be other or to look at others. To emulate in goalscoring records in others maybe but you’ve got to be yourself as a footballer.

“If you were a goalscorer in my day it would have been Ian Rush, so I’d be looking at him saying what parts of his game could I use wisely, but not to emulate him, just to add it into my toolbox.

“I think Andre is still learning and there are things from other strikers he can develop and use wisely, but I don’t like players trying to model themselves very close to other players, you’ve got to learn the game for yourself and then add other things in.”