Fantastic scenes as Wembley on Monday as Burnley won their play off against Sheffield United and will now play in the English Premier League.

As a Blackburn Rovers fan it is amazing to see Burnley make the top flight of football. For those of you who don’t know, Blackburn and Burnley are bitter, bitter rivals. When they play each other next season there will be fireworks on and off the field.

Burnley played 61 games this season with a roster of 23 players. Graham Alexander started all 61 games. That is a tremendous achievement by the players involved. Just shows that consistency is vitally important and whatever the coaching staff is doing to keep their players fit is obviously working. The staff at the Rovers should take a look at what Burnley do to keep their players in shape, the Rovers could do with all the help they can get in that department.

In the dressing room after the game, the captain of Burnley was asked what was the key to their success this season, he answered with a great lesson…he said that it was all about belief. “The manager believes in us, he treats us like men. This week as we prepared he convinced us that we were good enough to win this game and we did.”

That comment made me sit up and make note. Too many times we find fault in our players and focus on what they are doing wrong. The coach at Burnley obviously has done a tremendous job at instilling belief and confidence into his team and it then becomes a sort of self fulfilling prophecy.

I know I had a wake up call from the comments from Burnley’s captain. When my team returns for pre season training on the 25th August I will be focussing on what we are good at, how to make it better and quickly and effectively working on what we are not so good at.

My team needs belief and guidance and I just learned again yesterday how important that is. Thanks to Owen Coyle and his players at Burnley for being an inspiration to us all.

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