Brian Laws must surely be the only Premier League manager to have attended a job interview clutching a copy of a Deloitte financial report. The document helped him clinch the post vacated by Owen Coyle at Burnley and showed that, between 2006 and 2009, Laws, then with Sheffield Wednesday, boasted the Football League's best results-to-budget ratio.
Back in January, during a meeting at the Worsley Park Marriott hotel outside Manchester, Deloitte's analysis persuaded the Turf Moor board that the former Burnley full‑back was the right man to keep a squad whose top earners command only £15,000 a week in England's top division.
One win, one draw and eight defeats in the 10 games following his appointment may have shaken such faith but the 48-year-old knows victory at home to the similarly struggling Wolverhampton Wanderers tomorrow could change the entire complexion of Burnley's season.
"All my life I've worked at clubs with lower finances and managed to over-achieve or excel every season," said Laws, who has urged his players to secure the win which would lift them out of the bottom three, thereby seriously worrying not just Wolves but West Ham, Wigan and Coyle's Bolton. "You've got to rise above your circumstances."
Sacked by Sheffield Wednesday late last year, the one-time Grimsby and Scunthorpe manager is stung by those who reckon his low-key appointment should have been marked by the waving of a white flag over Turf Moor.
While conceding that the careful husbandry practised by Barry Kilby, his chairman, will ensure relegation does not preface financial catastrophe, Laws is adamant he and his players would regard it as a human calamity. "Other Premier League teams have huge wage bills and relegation for them would be a devastating blow," he said. "Finances are very tight and a lot of clubs are relying heavily on staying up. So there's massive pressure on them whereas at our place it's a different pressure. We want to stay here. It's the best league in the world and everybody thinks Burnley won't be in it next year, so we've got to prove them wrong.
"Every game now is big, enormous, a cup final. We can't disguise the Wolves match as something else. There's a lot riding on it and the rewards, well, everybody knows what they are. If we win, we jump out of the bottom three, so it comes with a huge incentive and its own pressures."
East Lancashire prudence should not be confused with lack of vision. Indeed Paul Fletcher, Burnley's chief executive, dreams of building England's first football university and teaching everything from pitch management to corporate catering and club accountancy within the shadow of his club's floodlights.
A product of the famous Wallsend Boys clubs, Laws hails from the university of hard knocks. "The knockers inspire you," he said. "There's nothing worse than hearing something bad about yourself but it's one of the best feelings in the world when you prove someone wrong. It drives you on and it's the same for the players. They all want to prove the pundits who are forever battering them wrong."
A bright beginning to the season had indicated Burnley could confound such doubters but once the clocks went back and adrenaline began evaporating, results deteriorated. Coyle presided over nine games without a league win immediately before defecting to Bolton.
Small wonder that Laws rather wryly said: "I haven't been here long enough to quite reinvent the wheel." Given sufficient time, he hopes to turn his team into the "new Stoke", albeit featuring game plans of a sweeter-passing nature.
"If we manage to stay up, then we'll look to spend a bit more," he said. "Stoke have done it this way. They didn't go out and spend massively. They did it in small chunks and have now become established. It's good business sense. Spending all your money at once doesn't guarantee you anything in the Premier League. Our chairman has done the wise thing which is don't put all your eggs in one basket because invariably what happens if you do is, well, look at Portsmouth ..."
