WELL we knew the festive period wasn’t going to be easy but at Spurs on Saturday our endeavours perhaps deserved a little more than a 2-1 defeat.

I said last week that I felt we were starting to get a little smarter and really beginning to mix it with the bigger teams in this division and we saw evidence again of that at White Hart Lane.

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Ashley Barnes’ strike certainly did not look out of place on the big stage and that will do his confidence the world of good.

In the end though - and Sean Dyche has said this a number of times - you need to be clinical in this division and I just felt Tottenham looked a little more capable of that.

There’s no shame in that and let’s not forget that the winner came from the swinging boot of Spurs’ £30m record signing Erik Lamela.

We’re probably not going to be in the market for a £10m player anytime soon let alone one three times that. But what we do have is a lot of courage and that is something a lot of teams around us will be envious of.

We need to make sure we are competitive in every game and right until the end on Saturday we were.

I know Dyche wasn’t too happy with Harry Kane’s opener on a couple of points - the initial free kick award and the hint of offside - and sometimes in this division you do need a little bit of luck.

He, and we, though can be rightly proud of the lads efforts. I remember getting smashed the last time we visited Spurs in the Premier League under Owen Coyle and coming away that day knowing that would be a bit of a brief stint in the top flight.

We’re much better prepared and better managed this time around and while the Christmas fixtures don’t, on paper at least, offer much in the way of winnable matches, the February run looks a little less daunting.

We have to keep plugging away and if we continue to play like we are doing then we’ll be all right.