Burnley became the first team to be relegated from the Premier League this season despite managing a goal and a victory at Hull, when wins for Sunderland and Leicester took the last two sides they could overtake out of reach.
Hull are now in the bottom three with the Lancashire club as a result and, with testing fixtures against Tottenham and Manchester United to come, Steve Bruce’s team are now favoured to follow Burnley into the Championship.
Danny Ings scored the only goal of the game when Hull’s Michael Dawson was off the field receiving treatment for a facial injury. The referee ordered him to change his bloodied shirt, something Bruce described as “a ludicrous rule”, but stopped short of blaming the incident for his team’s defeat.
“It was only a spot of blood, he could have carried on but I do not want to turn that into an excuse,” Bruce said. “We had no excuse, that was a game we needed to win and we were nowhere near the required level in any department. It was a poor performance just when we needed a strong one, and I have to take the blame because I didn’t get the best out of my players.”
Sean Dyche, in contrast, took pride in his players’ performance, as he has done all season, but accepted the odds facing Burnley were too great in the end. “The mentality was strong again today, as it has been all season,” the Burnley manager said.
“We have been to some of the Premier League’s superpowers and got points, I can’t tell you how proud I am of my players, and I am also proud of where the club is now compared to where it was two and a half years ago. There’s been a real change in mindset at the club in that time, but on the financial side things haven’t changed as fast.
“We are a well-run club but we have to live within our means. Our directors haven’t got tens of millions to throw around so we find it hard to compete with the money at other clubs. We gave it a good go, and we were in almost every game, but we were not able to win as many as we would have liked.”
Queens Park Rangers will go down on Sunday if they fail to win at Manchester City, and if that happens Hull (34 points) would join Newcastle (36), Sunderland (36), Leicester (37) and Aston Villa (38) in a fight to avoid the third relegation spot in the last two weeks of the season.
