FRANK Burnley manager Steve Cotterill believes that he may have been too loyal to under-performing players in their winless streak.

The Clarets have come under increasing pressure having not earned three points since their 2-1 win over Leeds United on November 28.

But Cotterill admitted he made some "big decisions" for Saturday's trip to Colchester United and he believed they paid off.

The most notable change was replacing Jon Harley with Chris McCann at left back, while Steve Jones was left out of the 16-man squad.

But Cotterill said they were decisions he felt had to be made for the benefit of the players themselves, as well as the team.

"We knew that coming down here we were going to have to have a big team," he said.

"With Jon Harley, I thought long and hard this week before picking the team. Sometimes you pick players on what you know they can do, not what they're actually doing at the moment.

"And I just feel at the moment, and probably going back now quite a few weeks, there have been people perhaps I should have left out of the team on the back of a couple of indifferent performances.

"Having said that, if you do do that you can sometimes ruin their confidence even more when you've got a smaller squad. And sometimes sticking with them can make them worse.

"So because of the size of the squad, I always have that dilemma of playing players, making them sub, leaving them out of the starting 16, and it's always an issue for me in my head.

"However, if we can get a bigger squad - one bad game is more than okay. I think when it goes into two, three, four and five bad games, trying to help them through it, you're actually probably doing them an injustice.

"So that's something I need to look at, certainly with the size of our squad, but you just hope they come out of it. Sometimes they don't, they go the other way.

"I've used Jon Harley as an instance but I'm talking about Steve Jones at the same time.

"When I told Jon Harley he wasn't playing and then I watched him train, he trained fantastically well, because the burden had been lifted off him.

"But sometimes we don't have a big enough squad to be able to lift the burden off players and we try to play them through it, and that ends up being to their detriment, to my detriment and to the club's detriment.

"We're trying to rectify that. If we can try to get ourselves - certainly what I would call a more competitive squad - then things might get better in the long term."

He added: "My problem is my loyalty to them. I think they will come back, then all of a sudden you could be two or three games down the line and they've got worse "Everybody clamours for them but they're not ready and they're not at it.

"That's where we're going. Steve Jones, for me, went on against Leicester the other night and didn't do enough for me to suggest he had to be involved.

"It's nothing personal. I had breakfast with Steve Jones, but that's the way it's got to be.

"We have to forget what's gone on in the past, we are where we are now and those lads I selected I felt served us and the club really well.

"We had some great support down here - all the way from Burnley to Colchester, with the run we're on - to be fair they deserve a massive, massive pat on the back today for following us."

Meanwhile, Cotterill admitted he wouldn't know the extent of the injuries Wayne Thomas and Chris McCann picked up until later this week.

The duo were both carried off on stretchers but were able to walk without crutches after the game.

"Wayne Thomas has tweaked his knee and Chris McCann has gone over on his ankle with a block tackle," the Burnley boss said.

"We just have to wait and see, we don't really know the severity of them."