Pro: It Would Hurt Their Momentum To Go Out
Don’t underestimate the role momentum plays in winning titles.
Sevco have the arrogant swagger again of a club that thinks it’s the dogs nuts because of their win against the Dutch the other night. If they go through against Galatasaray their players will take an awful lot of heart from it, and their club will take a big lift from it regardless of how their game tomorrow has ended up.
But if they lose then Gerrard suddenly looks like a fighter with a glass jaw, reeling from the last big punch, and on the way down.
Part of the Sevco fans belief in this guy up until now has come from this idea that he knows how to win huge games in Europe and that somehow proves that his record in domestic football is an aberration and down to luck and/or bad referees.
Don’t underestimate the importance of them seeing that illusion shattered, or the damage it will do to the dressing room morale.
I’ll cover that again later on.
You do not want Sevco getting up any sort of momentum here, so every bad result is something we should broadly welcome, even when it doesn’t directly affect us.
Them going out of Europe before the Groups means they’ve already regressed from last season … and that after spending a fortune they didn’t have to spend.
Momentum, once lost, is very difficult to regain.
If they find themselves in the same place they did from January onwards, with the feeling it’s all slipping away, it could go fast.