If you’ll allow me the indulgence, I’d like to take a moment to look ahead to the final, and to tell you what I’d like to see there.
I’d like to see us be the favourites.
What do I mean by that?
I mean that I would like us…
- to believe that we are the better team.
- to use our greater experience.
- to play like the trophy is destined to be ours.
Let’s think, for a minute, about how we’ve lost finals before, and how teams have beaten us. In particular, look at what Real did to us. Real – the cynical, white-shirted manifestation of the cold reality of greater power. The instantiation of superiority.
- They stayed tight.
- They let us expend our energy.
- They did not get caught up in the emotion of the occasion.
- They were, above all, ruthless.
No matter what happens, our opponents will be not just first timers, but first timers with the added ‘what a dream to even be here’ factor that we had last season. They will have a certain freedom because of that. They will have nothing to lose.
So how do we take a team with nothing to lose, and make sure that they lose everything, nonetheless?
We become that bastard, stubborn,...