Barnsley head coach Michael Duff opens up on his relationship with Sean Dyche after Reds visit

It extends beyond being great friends as well.

Not many League One bosses can pick up the telephone and speak to an experienced Premier League manager just like that. Barnsley chief Duff is someone who can.

Dyche - who worked wonders during his time at Turf Moor - is currently between jobs. At some point in the future, a struggling top-flight club is likely to beat a path to his door and offer him employment, such is his outstanding track record operating with comparatively modest resources at the Clarets.

He has already popped down to Oakwell to catch up with Duff this season at Barnsley, a proud and defiant one-town club like Burnley.

Like Dyche - who gave his Burnley players a questionnaire to complete anonymously in order to get their honest view of the existing culture at the club when he arrived in 2012 - Duff is big on core values.

His guiding principles revolve around hard work and humility and he won’t tolerate players with egos.

His players, like Dyche's at Burnley, aren't allowed to wear caps when they walk into the ground on match-days or don headphones either for instance.

On the pitch, like Burnley during much of Dyche's era, Duff's Barnsley side are also well organised, hard to beat and defensively robust.The eighth-placed Reds have the joint best defensive record in League One with Bolton.

The Oakwell outfit have amassed eight clean sheets already, the latest arriving at Shrewsbury on Saturday, and have conceded just one away goal in the second half of matches so far in 2022-23.

They are the sort of statistics that command respect and would go down well with Dyche.

Duff, a player under Dyche at Burnley before moving into the coaching realm after hanging up his boots, told The Yorkshire Post: "He came up quite early in the season. I speak to him quite regularly.

"I was supposed to go down and have lunch with him (recently) and he is someone I seek counsel from a lot. He has been there and done it and I have got a lot of respect for him. He tells it like it is and won't fluff things up good, bad or indifferent.

"I still consider myself a young manager, although I might not look it! Most things I have asked him about, he has already experienced. It is quite funny but sometimes we have conversations and he starts laughing. He says stuff like: 'You realise that was you (as a player) once' and 'how do I deal with this idiot here.' So that's why you are always careful to not be hypocritical as I was a young player once."

When it comes to Dyche, there are many nuances and plenty beneath the crew-cut and gravel-voiced exterior, according to Duff.

His man-management and not just his organisational qualities as a coach have made the biggest impression upon the Barnsley chief as much as anything and he has picked up plenty in that regard.

He continued: "I am four years and 200 games in. He (Dyche) has been good to me from the very first.

"I left Burnley to go to Cheltenham and didn't win a game for ten games and in that time, I probably spoke to him - if not every day, every other day.

"He just told me to keep sticking to what I believe in and keep working hard and don't try and cut corners. It worked for him and me as players.

"Because similar to me, he wasn't a great player.

"In terms of man-management and psychology, he is as good as there is in the business in my opinion.

"He knows how to get the best out of a group of people. I don't know it all and it is why I ask the staff regularly.

“It is impossible that I can always be right and sometimes, I will bounce a few ideas off him and sometimes, he will say: 'I think you are overthinking it, get on with it' or 'what about thinking of this?'.

On his other influences, Duff said: "There's two or three people. John Ward is my LMA (League Managers' Association) manager and mentor and I have learned things from him. Steve Cotterill is also someone I learned a lot of in the early part of my career and someone I spoke to a lot at Cheltenham."

Duff's Reds took the spoils at Cotterill's Shrewsbury in a game in which the term 'hard-fought' was made for. Right up to the moment late on when there was a flare-up after Brad Collins was fouled.

Barnsley's players stuck up for each other and protected their own. It's the sort of thing that Duff - and no doubt Dyche - appreciate.

Duff added: "Our lads protected their mate, then their lads protected their own. I would expect nothing else. It’s 94 minutes in.

"We don’t want our lads in melees all the time, but we want them to stick together.”