BEN Mee believes his former Turf Moor teammate Kieran Trippier will be ‘thrilled’ with Burnley’s success this season.

And while Mee is delighted to see Trippier doing so well with Tottenham and England he expects the battle lines to be drawn come kick-off on Saturday.

Trippier’s Spurs are sitting below the Clarets ahead of the 5.30pm kick-off, with Burnley a point clear in sixth after a stunning start to the season.

If Burnley avoid defeat they will be in the top six come Christmas Day and the clash with Tottenham marks the halfway point of the season.

Sean Dyche’s side have already collected 32 points and at the moment they are mixing it with the Premier League’s ‘Big Six’, and Mee thinks Trippier, a veteran of 185 Burnley games, will be delighted to see his old club doing so well.

“I know he still looks at our results and looks out for the boys so I’m sure he’s thrilled but he’ll want to beat us on Saturday,” the Clarets’ stand-in skipper said.

Mee and Trippier had been youth team colleagues at Manchester City before joining Burnley at the same time, both initially on loan for the 2011/12 season before making those moves permanent.

The pair, who played as full-backs on opposite flanks at Turf Moor before Mee’s move inside midway through the 2015/16 season, still keep in touch and the Burnley man is delighted to see Trippier doing so well, with the 27-year-old establishing himself as Spurs’ first-choice right-back and winning three England caps.

“It’s good to see lads you played with doing well, that’s a massive part of it,” Mee said. “You’re always looking out to see who is progressing and doing well.”

The clash with Tottenham starts a run of four Premier League games for the Clarets in 10 days and three of them are against Spurs, Manchester United and Liverpool.

With fears of a relegation battle now a distant memory Mee believes the festive period is a time to be enjoyed for Burnley as they face an acid test of their ambitions between Saturday and New Year’s Day.

“It’s a good test, they’re all good tests to be fair and it will be one we look forward too. We’ve got some good games coming up over Christmas,” he said.

But Mee insists the Burnley squad are sticking to the ‘one game at a time’ mantra that has served them so well under Dyche and as they refuse to look too far ahead, despite their fine start.

“It’s fantastic, but we’re not getting carried away. We know our targets and the sooner we hit them the sooner we can look at other ones,” the 28-year-old said.

“We want to keep grinding out these points and these wins and keep playing well.

“It’s the saying we had a couple of years ago, one game at a time, we carry on, nobody gets carried away, we don’t need to say it, we just know it.

“We’re a grounded and down to earth bunch of lads and we crack on with the job.”