SEAN Dyche will take charge of Burnley for the 200th time at the Emirates Stadium tomorrow and as he looked back on his 199 games as boss so far, there was one that stuck in his mind.

“The one without a shadow of a doubt is the Wigan game when we got promoted first time,” he said. “It was the balance of the performance and what it meant.”

Dyche freely admits Burnley were not expected to contend for promotion at the start of the 2013/14 season, and even the Turf Moor chief wasn’t sure his side had it in them at the start of August.

But having been forced to sell Charlie Austin just before the start of the season, the Clarets, fired by the goals of Danny Ings and Sam Vokes, stormed to an unlikely second place finish, securing promotion on Easter Monday with a 2-0 win over Wigan.

“It’s a season of work encapsulated in one very important game and delivered by the team fantastically well, under very high pressure circumstances, so that’s an outstanding memory,” remembered Dyche.

“The board and the fans often remind me of the Blackburn games, but I always say that’s for them, I wasn’t born here, I don’t know the depth of history.

“My personal one is Wigan. The delivery of that performance at the end of a season that meant so much was fantastic.

“As a manager and my staff looking at how the players went about that was a terrific measure of where we were at the beginning of the season and where we got to.”

Dyche is the seventh post-war Burnley manager to reach 200 games, and his win percentage of 41 per cent is bettered only by Harry Potts.

His first game in charge came with the Clarets 14th in the Championship, but as he enters the weekend of his double century Dyche can reflect with Burnley sitting in the top half of the Premier League.

“It’s been a very productive few years,” he said. “It’s about my staff as well, most of them have been here throughout, some I inherited when I got here who have done fantastically well and with Woany (Ian Woan), Tony (Loughlan) and Mark Howard I brought into the building.

“Every time we have re-moulded the team they’ve accepted the work, they’ve applied themselves correctly and the professionalism they’ve shown. The culture and environment I talk about a lot has been set but it still has to be nurtured and improved when we can.”

Dyche has managed to mould Burnley on and off the pitch since his Turf Moor arrival, but admits winning games is the only way to buy time in the job to do that.

And while the 45-year-old does have goals to achieve at the club, he added: “I’ve always been open minded. Goal setting can be good, you’ve got to set achievable goals.

“On the other hand that can be constricting. I try and find that balance of having distant goals in mind but being open minded enough to the what ifs.

“Our first promotion nobody gave us a chance and at the beginning of the season I wasn’t sure we could do it, as the season grew I was more assured. Probably consolidating was what we were looking for at the start of the season.

“You’ve got to open minded to know football can change quickly. We try not to constrict ourselves with too much goal setting but we have a bigger picture goal which so far we’ve achieved, not just on the pitch, with the training ground etc, these are things I discussed with the board when I came in here and things that were deemed needed for the longer term health of the club.”

He may hit 200 games in charge tomorrow, but that experience will be dwarfed by the man in the opposite dugout, with Arsene Wenger bringing up his 1,152nd game as Gunners boss.

It is a tally that Dyche believes will be difficult to achieve in future years.

“I’m not even sure managers will do that many games in the future,” he said.

“The demand now is so intense, particularly at the top level, the scrutiny, the media demand, the fan demand, eventually it will take its toll on some managers. Some will have enough years and go ‘you know what, as much as I love the game, that’s gone too far so I’m going to walk’.

“I don’t think you’ll see managers just managing until they can’t do it any more, I think they’ll have a cut off time.

“I think that will be a way modern managers like at it. Work really hard, give everything they can to the job and then just have a release point when they walk away, rather than continually doing management until the day no-one wants them. I think they’ll choose a point to exit.

The 67-year-old Frenchman is a man Dyche has plenty of admiration for and he regularly enjoys the chance to pick his brains.

He has also benefited from conversations with Sir Alex Ferguson and his old Chesterfield boss John Duncan, who is a regular sounding board for the Clarets chief.

Asked what he got from some of the older bosses in the game: “It’s snippets. Sometimes it’s there overview of football at large, sometimes you’re own club. Arsene has been balanced with his views about us, how we’ve managed, how we’ve built something from relative terms, which is nothing to what Arsenal have at their disposal. He’s been interested in that so it’s been a two way conversation.

“He’s respectful of what we’re trying to be.

“Sir Alex has got a different view, years of history he can share with you, situations he has dealt with and players he has dealt with.

“I speak to John Duncan a lot, I value his opinions on a lot of different things.

“I was speaking to a couple of younger managers the other day, younger than myself, I think managers speak more than you think and it’s always good to pick their brains.”

As a manager with a sacking under his belt, as well as two promotions and a relegation, Dyche already has plenty of experience and he has noticed his own role change from that of young gun picking the brains of more senior bosses, to being someone the next generation of managers can ring.

“A little bit. Not in a way of literal advice but more as a sounding board to ask a few questions,” he said of his change of role in the managerial hierarchy.

“Advice would be some of the older and wiser managers than me. John Duncan is one I speak to regularly. Not because of his management prowess, but he has a different view of things sometimes. He’s very good to bounce things off.

“Sometimes managers ring me just for a chat. ‘These are a few of the things I’m going through’. It’s more chewing the fat. Sometimes good things come out of that, for me as well.”