On the streets there can be no doubting the profound faith in the men of Burnley: in their upwardly mobile manager, Owen Coyle, and in players who will step out at Wembley tomorrow for the club’s 61st game of the season with the apparent durability of Duracell bunnies.

The Lancashire town, bedecked in claret and blue, is awash with pride. You can’t drive through without pennant-strewn vehicles bearing down on you. Nearly half the town’s population will be at Wembley. It is a mood encapsulated by Dare to Dream (Mighty Burnley), the club song, penned by a guitar tutor and a nine-year-old girl in memory of her late Burnley-fanatical grandfather.

Striker Robbie Blake, more than most, knows what promotion would mean to a town that last competed in the top flight in 1976. Four years ago, revered in this locality but wooed by several bigger clubs, he decamped to Birmingham in search of the Premier League good life he had already tasted for a season at Bradford City. He couldn’t compete with the likes of Emile Heskey and company. Blake played only 11 games, scoring twice. He moved on to Leeds, believing he could return with them to the elite. A wretched display by Kevin Blackwell’s team in the playoff final at the Millennium stadium, losing 3-0 to Watford, put paid to that. He returned to Burnley in 2007 on a mission to conclude “unfinished business”.

“When I came back all the staff were the same, the tea ladies, people like Kev the groundsman,” he says. “It gave me a big lift to see them. It was a wrench to leave but I was going to a big Premier League club at the time and I had to do it. It was just nice to get the opportunity to come back and hopefully on Monday I can pay them back a little bit more.”

Middlesbrough-born Blake, 33, adds: “There were a lot of talented players at Birmingham . . . good strikers, including Clinton Morrison, Heskey, Walter Pandiani, Mikael Forssell, but I’ve got no problems about what happened. I believe I can play at the highest level and it would be a great achievement to do it with Burnley.”

For Blake, today is a case of try, try, try again. Ten years before the Leeds humiliation, he was in the Darlington side that lost the Division Three playoff final. “The first time I was only young and it really didn’t sink in,” he says. “It was a bit of a blur. The Championship final with Leeds was very disappointing because we fancied ourselves strongly. Hopefully, for me, it’s third time lucky.”

Burnley are an inspiration to all small-town clubs with big ambitions. In January, they were within two minutes of a Carling Cup final appearance but lost to Tottenham after beating

Fulham, Chelsea and Arsenal. But no cup can compare with the status and potentially lucrative membership of the elite. Even going straight down again means an extraordinary comfortable parachute landing.

Burnley are a club who, for anybody of a certain age, conjure a sense of fine tradition and exhilarating forward play from the likes of Jimmy McIlroy, John Connelly, Leighton James and Ralph Coates. Many will recall the years under Harry Potts, during which Burnley won the second of the club’s two league championships, in 1960, and the following season reached the European Cup quarter-final.

Asking Coyle to emulate that is a tall order but under him there is confidence that Burnley could at least live in the Premier League. “He’s been a breath of fresh air,” says Blake. “At the start of the season we were really shaky and he left a few people out. I was one of those and he went back to a tight midfield and we went unbeaten in 13 games. I wasn’t playing for a while but he always said to me if I get my chance to take it. That’s why the competition’s so hot. If you don’t perform, you are out of the team.”

When the search was on to replace Steve Cotterill in November 2007, Brendan Flood, the multi-millionaire property developer who is the club’s operational director, was impressed by Coyle’s win record of about 50% as a manager at Falkirk and St Johnstone.

“Owen shared our vision for the evolution of the club,” Flood told me at the time. “He also has a good down-to-earth perspective on life, being brought up in the Gorbals. He can do phenomenally well. He is ambitious for himself and wants to be a Premier League manager as soon as he can.”

That could be swifter than anyone imagined. Even Coyle himself.

Whether or not Burnley secure promotion tomorrow, there will be demand for the services of the highly regarded former Bolton striker who places the accent so heavily on attack.

If Burnley do go up, Coyle insists he will not abandon those principles. “I always thought that, as a manager, I would send my team out to be positive regardless of who we are playing. We have reaped the rewards this season in the cup competitions by not compromising our style. I’m not saying we were playing gung-ho but we played it in a style we knew would win.”

Across the Pennines, a certain brand used to advertise its product as being “like tea used to be”. Turf Moor, in every sense, in the location, the support, the capacity to entertain, represents what football used to be. The Premier League would be the richer for it.