BURNLEY manager Steve Cotterill has said he will not be looking to appoint a new number two, after assistant manager Dave Kevan left Turf Moor to take up a similar position at his first club, Notts County.

Kevan's departure brings an end to a managerial partnership that began when Cotterill was appointed in the summer of 2004.

But the Clarets boss said that although Kevan is stepping down from the Championship to League Two, the offer of working with best friend Ian McParland, closer to home and at the club where the 39-year-old's football career began was too tempting an offer for his former Stoke City colleague to turn down.

And he revealed he wouldn't be mounting a search for a replacement.

"Dave is leaving us. It's very sad - I've known Dave for quite a while now," said Cotterill, who was disappointed the news had leaked ahead of Burnley's draw at Barnsley on Saturday.

"It's terrible really that rumour's come out from Notts County because they wanted to do that on Monday. I'm only answering the question honestly because they wanted to release it."

He continued: "McParland is Dave's best mate. Dave's family are in Nottingham, his children are there, and I think that ended up too big a pull. It's his old club also.

"We won't be doing any replacing at the moment. It will probably just up the workload a little bit for a few, but we'll get on with it and we'll be okay."

And Cotterill paid tribute to the work Kevan had done alongside him at Burnley.

"Dave a really good, honest, solid citizen, a really nice, popular character," he said. "He's probably a different character to myself.

"He's a good coach - we mustn't overlook that. Notts County are going to get a good coach and we'll be sad to see him go. But when I spoke to him on Wednesday, in his voice I could tell, when he was asking me the question, that he wanted to go. I've known him that long.

"We're disappointed with it, but what I didn't want to do was confuse him. I felt that we just had to move on with that, and we will."

Cotterill added that he was disappointed Kevan wasn't able to sign off with a Burnley win, after the Clarets had gone in front in a first half they had dominated, courtesy of Andy Gray's eighth goal of the season, but were pegged back after the break when Miguel Mostto capitalised on a corner.

I thought we were excellent in the first half.

"That's probably where the draw's come from today because at half-time we could have been three or four goals to the good.

"The thing is, after you have these breaks, anything other than week starts being derisory towards their fitness and you can't do anything about that other than work them hard in training.

"To be fair I thought both teams today worked from end to end right until the 92nd minute. So I thought it was an excellent advert for the Championship.

"We're just bitterly disappointed we haven't turned our first-half dominance into what could have been three or four goals to the good and we've ended up with a point.

"We're not totally happy with how we're defending set pieces, probably since the loss of Michael Duff who's 6ft 3 and heads balls in both boxes. But there's nothing we can do about that. We've tried our best to accommodate and move on but that's a big loss for us, and it's a problem every week.

"We do need to look at it. We thought do we do zones, which is something new, or do we stay as we are.

"Up until (the goal) we'd done okay but we still feel as though it's an area we want to improve on. Sometimes that can influence what players in pick in certain positions."