Burnley are top of the Championship at Christmas. It's fair to say that Vincent Kompany is way ahead of schedule. twoht is impressed.
In amongst the many characteristics that make up the soup that is a successful football team, how a group of players react to defeat can be under-estimated. Few teams will go through an entire season unbeaten, and how they react to the sting of defeat can make the difference between silverware and wondering what might have been.
Any doubters needn’t have worried. Burnley breezed to comfortable 3-0 win against Blackburn, and since returning from their World Cup break they’ve followed that with wins against Queens Park Rangers and Middlesbrough. Burnley are now eight points clear of Blackburn and three points clear of Sheffield United, and will be top of the Championship for Christmas. Tucked into the gap before Christmas comes a Carabao Cup trip to Old Trafford to play Manchester United.
These weren’t the only reasons for some degree of trepidation during the summer. Relegation had brought a clear-out of the first-team squad, so whatever followed was always going to be. And the Championship is a unique football landscape to anywhere else. In no other division does the distinctive smell of desperation hang quite so heavy in the air, and that desperation can do strange things to people, be they owners, managers, or even players.
With each game that has passed since the Sheffield United clash, Burnley have made that result look more like the blip it surely was. Long-time striker Ashley Barnes scored his first two league goals of the season to help them on their way to that win against Blackburn. At QPR, they were two up by half-time and three up by the end. Against Middlesbrough they conceded first, but they came back to win with a degree to spare.
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