SEAN Dyche believes Burnley teenagers Dan Agyei and Aiden O’Neill are showing the way for the Clarets’ crop of youngsters to earn their first-team chance.

Agyei, 19, made his Premier League debut at Liverpool recently and has been involved with the senior squad since returning from a loan spell at Coventry City, while 18-year-old O’Neill played three Premier League games earlier this season before moving to Oldham on loan.

Dyche insists both youngsters have earned their chance to be around the first team, but he is also aware that their presence around the seniors in training and on matchdays can act as an inspiration for the rest of the development and youth squads at Turf Moor.

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“It was a big part of a few years ago when I spoke about the bigger picture of the club and how I was hoping it would move forward,” Dyche said.

“It’s a tiny thing but even with the design of the building and the pitches, all of those little aspirational things add to the path of a young player. It’s seeing a young player in the building who moves up the ladder to get in and around the first team.

“It shows there is a way, it shows there is life in doing that, but they have to be good enough. We do it authentically and Dan Agyei, I think, is someone who should definitely be around our first-team squad.

“Same with Aiden but he did it the other way around, he was with us early season but has now gone out on loan.

“They are two amongst a number who are just showing signs over the last six months to a year of progressing.”

Agyei has recently spoken of the benefit of training with first-team defenders and strikers on his game.

Dyche believes that can only help his game but is also keen for his youngsters to learn for themselves rather than being fed too much information.

“Some of it is the mental side of it,” explained Dyche. “How did you find playing against Tarky? He’s a big, strong player and he’s going to bump you. How did you find that, the physical side of it, did you make you angry, make you more focused, make you move differently?

“Self-learning has gone out of the game a little bit but we try and encourage that and guide them rather than telling them everything they need to know.

“I think self-learning is a really important thing, it’s a dying thing in football because we’ve all gone feedback crazy. It’s gone so far that sometimes players don’t have to think for themselves.

“The best learning I had was being told what for and then having two days to think it through. You didn’t have a coach the next day coming in, de-briefing it and talking you through it to where you felt alright again. You had 48 hours of racking your brains thinking ‘Why did I do that? Could I have done this? Could I have done that?’”