Sean Dyche insisted he was happy with the performance of his Burnley side, despite losing 2-0 to Stoke City.

The Clarets boss rang the changes for the trip to the Bet365 Stadium, with Matt Lowton, Sam Vokes and Steven Defour all dropping to the bench, while Johann Berg Gudmundsson was ruled out with a hamstring injury.

Jon Flanagan came in at right-back, while Andre Gray lined up alongside Ashley Barnes as Dyche reverted back to a 4-4-2 formation.

Dyche frustrated with soft goals

The Burnley manager bemoaned the "two soft goals", but felt "it was a very good performance," and that his side "took the game on, which we wanted to do, and looked more like ourselves," before adding: "I thought the mentality was clear and some of the football we played was good."

Saturday’s defeat was Burnley’s fifth from six games on the road this season, and Dyche readily admitted that "we know we have to change our away form… even though that’s difficult, there were clear signs today that was a team that went to win a game," and added "we haven’t shown much away from home."

'There was a lot of heart'

Meanwhile, stand-in captain Ben Mee echoed the thoughts of his manager, as he believed Burnley showed plenty of fight in their quest to end their away day woes.

Although the Clarets couldn’t force their way through Stoke’s resolute defence, Mee was encouraged by the improvement in performance by insisting "West Brom wasn’t good at all, but today we wanted to put that right," and said "we were more like ourselves, although we didn’t test the goalkeeper enough."

Mee observed that "there was a lot of heart and lot of fight and spirit from us but just a bit of quality let us down." The Clarets defender also believed "in the second half we played well, but we just lacked that bit of cutting edge to test the goalkeeper and get that clear cut chance."

Former Manchester City defender Mee added that "they [Stoke] were rocking; you could sense that around the ground. We bossed the second half and if we had a got a goal they would have been on the ropes."

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