MICHAEL Duff believes teenagers Ollie Younger and Dwight McNeil will benefit from their experience with the Clarets first team last weekend.

The 18-year-olds were part of Sean Dyche's squad for the trip to Swansea as injuries continue to bite at senior level, but they were back in action for the Under-23s on Thursday.

It was a bump down to earth with Burnley beaten 5-0 by Birmingham City at the Barnfield Training Centre, but Duff highlighted McNeil's performance in central midfield as a plus point.

He has trained regularly with the first team this season and Duff believes those sessions are starting to have an impact on his game.

"It’s good for them. Dwight looks like he’s been training with the first team, he looks sharper, he’s doing things quicker because of the demands of training with the first team," the former Clarets defender, who is now in charge of the Under-23s, said.

"It’s the little things, they’d have to get on a plane to go down to Swansea, on a little chartered plane, they’ll never have done that before.

"Watching the buzz of a Premier League game, you turn up at the ground an hour and a half before and it’s really busy.

"It’s all learning curves and it gives them a little taste of where they want to go. They’re a long way from that but it’s a little taster."

Duff's side have endured a testing first season in the Professional Development League and they remain bottom of the north group after defeat to the Blues.

But the boss insists plenty can still be learnt from such a heavy defeat.

"We’ll learn more from that than they will," he said. "Once you get to 3-0 or so you switch off and stop learning. We’ll pick the bones out and tell them what they need to do better.

"It won’t be pleasant. It should hurt a few and they should be determined not to let it happen again.

"That’s not to say it won’t but as long as you can affect one person from that game then it’s been worth it."

Duff added: "It was a weird game, they scored five goals from outside the box which is an anomaly in itself.

"Their youngest player was 20, that’s the oldest group they can have, we were young and had three trialists playing.

"It was tough, but as I’ve said before we’re not in a results industry, we’re in a development industry.

"It’s disappointing to lose the game but there were pluses within it, I thought Dwight was excellent, Ntumba (Massanka) was better than he has been recently.

"It looked like an academy game, our chances came from really good football, but you can’t always play really good football, someone has got to put their foot in sometimes and sometimes you have to whack it down the pitch and fight for a second ball, which they did better than us."