STEVE Cotterill is refusing to press the panic button when looking for loans to strengthen his squad.

Burnley are down to just 16 available players for tonight's Turf Moor tester against Wolverhampton Wanderers, with both Frank Sinclair and Wayne Thomas suspended.

But with a free weekend ahead to step up his search, Cotterill has vowed to spend his limited budget wisely rather than impulsively splash the cash to plug gaping holes in his squad.

The Clarets chief said: "It's crossed my mind to bring in a goalkeeper, players in defensive positions, midfield positions and strikers.

"But while you can clamour for bodies through the door, it is no good if they are not going to be any good to you. They have to be the right players to go in your team and on the right money and if you can't do that, you get on with what you've got and deal with it to the best of your ability.

"I think we've done that from the moment I arrived at the club and it's not going to change now."

Cotterill added: "We have been very lucky with our loans. We haven't brought in any bad ones, but nobody wants to let go of their good players any more. "The Premiership squads are smaller, so they can't afford to loan out players they might normally look to. That means you have to go for the ones who are untried, but you have to be very careful with that, especially if you don't want to waste the money.

"It's a lot easier if you have money to speculate and not get too disappointed if it doesn't come off, but when we need a loan, we need them to be playing.

"Unfortunately, what happens is a lot of the players you would like to sign go at the early part of the transfer window.

"At one stage we were fifth in the table at the back end of December, which is the time you want to bring people in.

"However, we didn't have the finances - and when we did it was very difficult in three working days to try and find replacements."

All of which makes the Clarets run of seven wins from their last nine home games even more creditable.

And Cotterill knows another victory on home turf tonight would enable Burnley to leapfrog Wolves and possibly climb to a position in the table he feels his side deserve.

"I don't think our current position reflects where we should be," he insisted. "I think we should be a touch higher at the moment because earlier in the season we played better than some of our results suggested.

Then we went on a bit of a purple patch and things obviously became a little bit more difficult when that stupid transfer window opened!

"I haven't really taken a lot of notice about where Wolves are in the table. I just know that if we win tonight night we go above them and, if another couple of results go the right way, which they could, we could go eighth."