Laws: Burnley will fight to the finish (From This Is Lancashire)

Laws: Burnley will fight to the finish

9:50am Monday 22nd March 2010 in

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BRIAN Laws has described Burnley’s battle for Premier League survival as “a tall order” but insists it will be a fight to the finish.

The Clarets suffered their 15th away defeat when Hugo Rodallega thumped in a cruel stoppage time header to give Wigan a seven-point cushion above the drop zone and keep Burnley in it with just seven games to go.

With only one point picked up away from home all season, and Manchester City, Liverpool and Spurs still to come to Turf Moor after next week’s derby with Blackburn Rovers, it looks an impossible mission to stay up.

But Laws insists he has not given up hope, and based on a performance which he felt deserved at least a point, he knows his players haven’t either.

“Nobody’s kidding themselves, of course it’s a tall order.

"We know there’s starting to be a gap. But you can’t let that ruin a great season that the club have had and ruin a situation that we’re in now,” said the 48-year-old.

“We’re still in the fight. It’s well and truly mathematically possible (to stay up).

"But we’ve got to start winning games, there’s no question about it.

“You don’t have to be Einstein to understand that.

"It’s a simple fact that we’ve got to start winning games.

"But performances like that do encourage you to believe you can go on and win games in the Premier League.

“We’ve got to keep believing that we can turn things around, and certainly that performance alone will tell me and tells everybody else - the supporters in particular - that the players haven’t given up.

“They’re going to keep driving on, and if they put in performances like that, particularly against our next opponents, which is going to be a huge game for us - Blackburn at home - we could see ourselves winning that game, for sure.”

But Laws admitted it would take him the rest of the weekend to recover from a devastating stoppage time blow.

“It’s devastating to lose any game but to lose it in that manner is a cruel blow,” he said.

“We’re all going to be licking our wounds over the weekend, no question about it.

"I’ll be sulking as much as anybody else. It will be a terrible weekend for me.

“However, I’ll come in bright and breezy on Monday and we’ll get going again because that’s what we have to do, lift ourselves up and prepare ourselves for a magnificent game against Blackburn.

“I can’t wait!”

He added: “The one thing that’s warmed me is the performance, the commitment, the desire and the drive that we had.

"We certainly didn’t sit back, we weren’t worried about them, in fact I thought we took the game to Wigan and we deserved something out of it.

“Unfortunately we didn’t, but we mustn’t let that affect us.

“The supporters will go away really disappointed because they’ve seen the team put in such a sterling performance and deserve to get something out of the game.

“We didn’t get it but if we continue playing like that they’ll be happy for the fact that we’re doing that, no matter what happens.

"Even if we go down, but we go down fighting.

“Certainly (Saturday) was a fight.”