George Boyd believes Burnley's aggression affected Manchester City and that the Premier League champions are not used to being tackled or pressed.
Former Hull winger Boyd scored the only goal of Saturday's game at Turf Moor and he felt the Clarets capitalised on City's weaknesses -- including a reluctance to track back.
Burnley have taken four points against City this season, as well as drawing away at Chelsea and at home to Manchester United, and Boyd said the key to facing such sides is to be aggressive enough to prevent them from playing their own game.
"You find with the bigger teams, obviously they're world class players and can cut you open in a second, but if you get in amongst them and press them they don't really like it because they're not used to it," he said, as he outlined Burnley's game plan against the best.
"If you press them hard and tackle them because they're not used to being tackled, we did that. A few long balls, too, they're not bad balls - more diagonal balls - so it's unfamiliar to them and playing to our strengths."
City have lost three of their last four games and Boyd said they learned from the champions' defeat at Anfield.
He said: "I think you saw it recently against Liverpool, their tracking back - they don't track back as well as they go forward so we knew we could exploit that and we did."
Boyd felt Burnley kept City midfielder Yaya Toure quieter than most teams do, adding: "Obviously we had the striker dropping on their deepest midfielder but we did well to stop him because he's a great player but he was not in the game as much as he usually is, that's true."
And he felt his half-volleyed winner came because of a flaw in City's set-piece marking, explaining: "I said to Shacks [captain Jason Shackell] to head it back because there was no one marking on the edge of the area. I think it was [Vincent] Kompany who headed it out and I just caught it sweetly. I think you know straight away when you have hit it that sweetly that it's going in.
"I think it's the most important goal of my career because it gives us a great chance of staying up."