IT will hardly come as news to anyone who has seen Burnley on a semi-regular basis this season, but if the last few weeks have underlined one thing, it’s the increasingly pressing need for some reinforcements.

Sean Dyche and his squad have done exceptionally well to have made it to January and still be in with a shout of avoiding relegation.

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And no-one is suggesting that the players who have manoeuvred the club out of the relegation zone won’t be good enough to keep them there until the end of the campaign.

Yet equally, there have been signs in the past few games that the group would benefit from two or three judicious additions.

At St James’ Park, for example, injury and illness forced Dyche into using all three substitutes after just 36 minutes.

An absence of like for like replacements on the bench resulted in half the team being reshuffled and a number of players being deployed in unfamiliar positions.

That Burnley fought back so brilliantly was at least partly down to the character of the group and sheer bloody-mindedness.

Arguably, that was an odd set of circumstances, but it doesn’t detract from the fact that when push came to shove, square pegs were used where round ones might have proved more effective.

Fast-forward to last Wednesday’s FA Cup replay at White Hart Lane and the relative thinness of the squad was again exposed when players such as Ross Wallace and Marvin Sordell were brought in from the cold.

Having relinquished a two-goal lead in that game, the Clarets repeated the trick in the league against Crystal Palace on Saturday.

To borrow an old phrase of Stan Ternent’s, a blind man on a galloping horse could see that the team could have done with shaking up a bit.

Tiredness can be a psychological problem as well as a physical one and it may well be the case that one or two of Dyche’s charges were suffering from mental burnout against Alan Pardew’s side.

Central midfield is the area most obviously in need of a boost.

David Jones and Dean Marney have played together non-stop for virtually 18 months. If either (or both) of them go missing, performances and results go off the boil.

A failure to address this situation threatens to compromise the good work that has been done so far.

Burnley’s elimination from the cup affords them some breathing space.

Here’s hoping that by the time we face Sunderland, batteries will have been recharged and there will be one or two new faces in the camp.