'Pigeonhole me all you want': Burnley boss Vincent Kompany questions style of play narrative ahead of Sean Dyche Everton meeting

Burnley stormed to the Championship title last season, amassing 101 points playing a stunning brand of football.

While the Clarets attempted to replicate that style back in the Premier League, certainly at the start of the campaign, they’ve since adapted and learned to mix things up in more recent weeks.

Defensively they’ve been a lot more solid and they’ve learned to remain competitive in games – something Kompany attributes to Burnley’s new-found “pragmatism”.

“I really don’t like the word philosophy because there’s a lot of pragmatism to what we do, a lot,” Kompany said.

“Eventually you have a set of beliefs and you follow that, but you always adapt to what you’re facing and what you have.”

Kompany was talking ahead of today’s game against Everton, which will see the Belgian come up against his Burnley predecessor Sean Dyche.

Dyche was often pigeonholed as a manager that preferred to play a more direct, physical brand across his 10 years with the club.

While Kompany has drastically altered Burnley’s approach, there are plenty of other values he’s opted to keep.

He said: “You come first as a coach and you have something you’re able to transfer to the players. There’s coaching content.

“The second thing is also values. When I keep mentioning hard work and effort, you can imagine someone else saying those words, right?

“In my career, I was an aggressive player and I love the aggression in a side as well. You could imagine another person saying those same words.

“There’s a picture that can get painted that has absolutely nothing to do with who I am as a person, there are things I am absolutely aligned with. There are other things where I am different, otherwise we’d all be the same.

“But it’s not been difficult for me to carry on something that was already present in this club. It’s something I place really highly within our culture.”

Kompany also went on to say there’s perhaps more in common between him and Dyche than initially meets the eye.

He concluded: “At the moment I’m trying to un-pigeonhole myself, but you’re an incredible force. No matter what I say it’s not going to happen, is it?

“But I said it last year about our pressing, our duels, how aggressive our team was. If a player falls on the floor, it’s me who is dragging them up and saying ‘get on the pitch because you’re embarrassing us’. That’s my mentality.

“Pigeonhole me all you want, but I know if there is a big tackle flying in I will be the first person to be out of my seat in celebration. It’s a side of the game that I appreciate so much.

“But there needs to be some difference somewhere and for me I have an idea of how you come to create a chance and a goal and that’s how we’ve created our chances and scored our goals.

“For me, the disrespectful thing for me, at any club at any level, is if you don’t put in the work. Then you have a problem.

“A club where players aren’t interested, staff aren’t interested, that couldn’t happen on my watch. Not a chance.”