KEVIN Horlock today stressed that Ipswich Town were denied a result at Burnley last night by the shin of Blues' defender, Jason De Vos. Ipswich lost 3-0 at Turf Moor to a Burnley side that began the match second from bottom.

By Elvin King

KEVIN Horlock today stressed that Ipswich Town were denied a result at Burnley last night by the shin of Blue's defender, Jason DeVos.

Ipswich lost three - nil at Turf Moor to a Burnley side that began the match second from bottom.

And they gave a very poor performance and can have no excuses about the margin of their loss.

But the Burnley first goal came in the 32nd minute, courtesy of a wicked deflection when James O'Connor's 25 yard shot struck DeVos and drifted slowly but surely over a stranded Lewis Price and just under the bar.

Burnley went on to take control from that stage and score further goals in the second period through Garreth O'Connor and Chris McGann. Horlock said: “Without that deflection, I feel that we would probably have gone on and won the match.

We had dominated too much perhaps in the opening stages.

Burnley must have been shattered after the way we passed the ball around, but they were given a timely lift when they scored that opening goal.

It turned the match on its head and once they scored their second, the match was over, although we did our best to get back into it.

We had a four hour plus journey home last night to reflect on our performance and after going behind, it was not one that we will look back on with any great pride.

We must now put it right against Crewe at Portman Road on Saturday and in the meantime, must knuckle down and work hard in training.

If the manager decides to make changes, we will stand by him and the Crewe match now becomes a big one as we look to move up the table in October with our fixture list, on paper anyway, not as strong as it was for this month.”

Ipswich never had a shot on target in the whole of the 90 minutes and after the highs of the surprise victory at Leeds, it was a thoroughly disappointing evening.

There were no injuries picked up and manager Royal might possibly have his squad strengthened at the weekend with experienced striker Nicky Forster hoping to resume full training tomorrow (THURSDAY) and possibly be available for the squad against Crewe.