STRIKER Andre Gray insists Burnley want to ‘make a statement’ in the Premier League this season.

The Clarets are looking for top flight survival at the first attempt for the first time, having been relegated in both 2009/10 and 2014/15. But Gray, who finished last season as the top goalscorer in the Championship, said minds were focused on more than a fight for safety over the next 10 months.

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“We’re not going in there just to try and survive and scrap every week. We want to make a statement,” said Gray. “The last couple of years have proved that teams don’t go up and (always) come back down straight away. We’ve got a good team and I’m sure we’ll be able to do well.”

Joey Barton sent a similar message before he left Turf Moor to sign for Rangers in May, insisting the target had to be more than just a 17th placed finished.

And despite Barton’s decision to swap the Premier League for Scotland, that mindset is being driven on by Gray, who is also refusing to set himself a personal goals target in his first season in the top flight.

“I think Joey touched on it last year – if you aim low you shoot low, you can’t think like that,” said the former Brentford striker who scored 25 league goals last term, 23 of them for the Clarets.

“We had a meeting last year and we were all given the question ‘where do you want to finish?’ We all said ‘we want to be champions’. If we’d have all answered with the ‘play-offs’ then we probably would have finished up in the play-offs.

“We’ve got to believe in ourselves. It doesn’t make any sense to set your standards low because then you start aiming low.

“It’s like me, I tend not to say that I want to score 10 or 15 goals because when I get to that I’d feel settled. I want to score in every game. It’s all in your head.”

Burnley will begin their Premier League campaign against Swansea City on August 13 defending a 23-game unbeaten league run, with their last defeat on Boxing Day 2015 when they were beaten 3-0 by Hull City.

Progress might not be as smooth in the top flight but having spent a year with this squad Gray has no doubt that Burnley will be able to recover from any setbacks.

“You might hit some difficult times when you lose a few on the bounce but that’s when you’ve got to stick together,” he said.

“That’s what happened last season. We lost to Hull and people thought it was out of our hands but then we went on a good run.

“We just had to keep doing what we were doing on the training pitch, maybe work that little bit harder, and make sure we stuck together.

“As soon as you start to separate the divide comes and then there’s no togetherness so you’d be destined to fail from then on.

“We’re not like that because we’re a very strong-minded group and a strong team so we’ll get through whatever gets thrown at us.”