Thursday 20 March 2008

A reality check


Yep that's right. Grand Slam Super De Duper Sunday where nothing in your life will matter except football. In fact no Sunday will ever be more important than this one, no Sunday in your entire life.

Bullshit hyperbole aside I'm not going to talk about the absolute cringeworthy, mind melting, crap that Sky comes out with to label these two fixtures that have once again been conveniently arranged by the FA to fall on the same weekend. Barney Ronay succinctly summed up my own feelings prior to a previous GRAND SLAM SHIT YOUR PANTS SUNDAY.

No instead, there has been lots of talk coming out of Melwood in the past few days about how confident everyone appears to be heading into Sunday's game at Old Trafford against league leaders Manchester United.

Nothing wrong with confidence in fact it's the lack of it this season that has led to our title challenge petering out long before we would have liked but it is setting us up for a fall.

Apparently Andy Gray was on Sky Sports last Sunday saying things might get interesting in the title race should we win at Old Trafford on Sunday. You just know Sky will relish bigging us up on Sunday and then chastising us afterwards if we lose.

It may be true that things might get interesting should we win but the fact is that even if we were to come out Castle Greyskull and the Emirates next month with six points it is extremely unlikely that we will be champions come mid-May.

There was a headline on the ESPN "saw-ker" website a few days ago that screamed "Benitez: It's on!". That wasn't what he actually said at all in any of his quotes but United will no doubt pick up on the rhetoric and use it as a way of geeing themselves up for Sunday not that they'll need much geeing up anyway. This is Man U v Liverpool after all.

But in the last few days we've had Xabi Alonso, Alvaro Arbeloa and John Arne Riise all coming out with how much confidence they have going into the game and how United should be fearful of what the Daily Post have labelled the TAG team - Torres and Gerrard...how original...

We'd be better off getting the head down and getting on with our business. The message boards have been awash with confident statements about how we just might be able to do something incredible between now and May but the facts are that we are 11 points off the pace with eight games to go.

We should concentrate on securing Champions League football next season, and then see how close we can finish to the top. If we can narrow the gap from last season great but we should leave talk of a late title push behind.

We blew it, it was bad, very bad at times this season and there remains a lot of questions about certain players in this team but let's concentrate on doing the best we can in the remaining games at home and in Europe and see where we are in the summer where there will be more movements in and out of the club.

What we have learned from this encouraging run of wins is that Benitez is definitely the man for the job, a settled side and formation is the way forward and a few summer tweaks will hopefully see us sustain the kind of run we opened this season with right through to this time next season.

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