SEAN Dyche’s depleted Burnley could be boosted by the return of James Tarkowski for Wednesday night’s Carabao Cup tie at Millwall.

The stretched Clarets went down 4-2 at Leicester in a game which saw Kevin Long and Jimmy Dunne form an unfamiliar central defensive partnership.

The latter scored on his Premier League debut to reduce the arrears to 3-2 only for Dennis Praet’s stunner to confirm Burnley’s league opener would end in defeat.

Chris Wood had put the Clarets in front but after Harvey Barnes equalised the game went away from the visitors early in the second half thanks to an unfortunate Erik Pieters own goal and a strike from James Justin.

Tarkowski, the subject of bids from West Ham, is set to return from a toe injury to add to Dyche’s options however, the Turf Moor boss having only added third choice goalkeeper Will Norris to his ranks in this transfer window.

Dyche said: “There are certainly positives there, we are stretched at the moment but the mentality was excellent.

“Some of the chances we created were really good at this level and on another day Woody could have had a hat-trick.

“The deflected goal (Pieters) was a killer for us, I thought we had a good grip of the game at that stage.

“That’s every player we have got currently. It makes the job slightly harder when you haven’t got the bodies. We work with what we’ve got, we’ve done that before.

“With Tarky’s toe (injury), we’re expecting him to have every chance to play against Millwall in the cup game.

“We’ve got a great mentality which we’ve shown here and we’ll take it onto the next game and see where we go with it.”