BURNLEY boss Sean Dyche says Saturday’s home loss to Crystal Palace must serve as a reminder that his players cannot afford to drop their performance levels in the battle against relegation.

The Clarets had taken five points from their previous three league matches and looked on course to climb as high as 12th in the Premier League table when they led 2-0 at the weekend, but Palace hit back to claim a 3-2 victory at Turf Moor.

MORE TOP STORIES:

Dyche felt that his side had delivered only their second poor performance of the season, after a 4-0 loss at West Bromwich Albion in September.

But he stressed that there must be no repeat if Burnley are to remain in the Premier League.

“These are just knocks, they are just reminders,” he said of Saturday’s defeat.

“You can’t win them all, but they’re a big reminder of what we have to do at this level.

“The players are disappointed. They know when they’re performing well and they know when they’re not quite performing well.

“I said to them afterwards if you come one per cent off your performance levels at this level of football, you’re not guaranteed anything.

“You have to play hard all the time.

“We were just off on Saturday and just off is too far for us in this level of football.

“Sometimes the hardest thing in management is to snap teams out of that kind of performance level when they’re just below par.

“You can normally snap it out if there are two or three below par but when you’ve got four, five and six then it becomes more difficult.

“The margins are fine. They weren’t radically poor performances, they were just off their performance levels.

“At this level for a club like ourselves and a team like ourselves who are learning, you can’t afford to do that.

“You’ve got to be right on top of your performances all of the time.”

Burnley lost despite leading 2-0 for the second time in four days, after a 4-2 FA Cup defeat at Tottenham on Wednesday.

But Dyche insisted he did not feel fatigue or a busy fixture list were in any way a factor.

“No I don’t think so, we made changes in the week so you can’t really use that [as an excuse],” he said.

“Sometimes it is what it is. It’s the hardest thing to define in management, our performance level has been very good lately, physically, tactically, the technical side of the game.

“We have been creating chances and scoring goals.

“It sometimes is a head-scratcher but we’ll work it out, speak to the players and be ready to go again when the next game comes.”

Burnley’s exit from the FA Cup means that they are now without a game until the trip to Sunderland on January 31.

But Dyche, who was without Lukas Jutkiewicz because of a cut foot on Saturday, says there must be a sense of perspective about the Palace loss.

“I must say there have only really been two, what I feel have been, below par performances this season,” he said.

“I think the other performances have been very good.

“In the bigger picture of the season I’m not going to start over-thinking it. You’ve got to remember that most people thought we’d need snookers by now.

“We’re still in there, we’re still in good shape.”