SEAN Dyche believes Burnley’s climb out of the relegation zone will give his players further belief that they can compete in the Premier League.

The Clarets moved up to 17th in the table with a 1-0 win at home to Southampton on Saturday, although QPR can leapfrog them if they avoid defeat at Everton tonight.

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Dyche insists he is not paying too much attention to the league table at this stage of the season but did admit that the Clarets’ rise out of the bottom three would only give his team confidence.

“If you’re beginning to find success in any walk of life you feel more confident, more at ease and you deliver usually with a bit more freedom,” said the Burnley boss.

“The players are doing that well at the moment but there’s a real authenticity and honesty about this group, they get it from me and the staff and between themselves.

“They know this is not a walk in the park.

“But we haven’t really thought about the table either way, and I mean that sincerely.

“We weren’t thinking about the league every week last year. We believe in performances, if they’re correct they usually get you what you want. There’s no guarantee with that but usually.

“We played very well at QPR and didn’t get anything. On Saturday arguably we didn’t play as well as at QPR yet we got a win.

“Particularly early in the season there was a lot made of us not winning a game and I said then that I was looking through the results to look at the performances.

“There has to be a future in how the team are playing and I thought there was early season.

“There are no guarantees for the rest of the season but the future I saw then is now beginning to deliver some results and at least make us even more competitive than we were in games.”

Burnley have now taken 11 points from their last six games and Dyche thinks that other clubs in the Premier League will be viewing his side differently now.

“I can only imagine that people think it’s different now, they’ve got a few wins now,” he said.

“Early season they’re maybe thinking, ‘If we score first they’re going to find this difficult’.

“Now I think they’re maybe looking at that differently, but they’ll have to decide that.

“We can only look at what we do and prepare appropriately for every challenge that comes our way.”

Southampton boss Ronald Koeman remarked upon Burnley’s ‘direct’ style after Saturday’s game, but Dyche was just pleased that the performance brought victory.

“I think there’s a belief about what we do,” Dyche said.

“We didn’t come into this division thinking we’d have 500 passes a game and rip teams to shreds.

“We knew we’d have to find different ways of winning. We did that last year and we’ve taken that mentality into this year.

“I must say that I thought some of the football in the first half was very good. There were pockets of it in the second half, but they got the upper hand slightly.

“We have to give everything we can in any game and we’re showing good signs of different sides of ourselves.

“We had to give everything at Stoke, we had to fight, the will and demand of the team.

“Saturday was more of a mixture. I thought there were some good flashes of good play, some attractive football at times, and then a resilience at the end.”