God the Trent chat is making me glad I’m not watching or reading anything about the game before kick off apart from on here. Loads of chat about nothing, and loads of hot takes to be made from it depending on which way the score goes.
Just win tomorrow please!
He's not playing so it doesn't have an impact. If he were to be playing, the spotlight would be on him and all that...
Right, we have a game to win. Winning it wouldn't be decisive at this stage but it give us a 2-game gap over City.
We play before them on the 31st and that would be a chance to go seven points clear.
If City beat Arsenal- we'll have a two game gap on the two teams
If Arsenal beat City- we'll have a 3-game gap on City
Draw- we'll have a two game gap over the two teams.
*two-game gap- we need to drop points in two gameweeks and the other team needs to win in those two weeks to overtake us.
The mantra is "one game at a time" but the next two gameweeks are 2-in-1 for me and we will have a clearer picture on the 31st.
Analysing the City game this way shows the impact of winning this.
Why is a two-game gap important anyway?
1. If you have a two-game gap with 9 games to go. Effectively, you only need to maintain it for seven games. Win the next game and it becomes 6.
2. Our opponents will be under pressure to be perfect to avoid losing more ground.
3. They can no longer affect our results directly as we'll have already played them twice so they can only watch on the Tele and pray.
4. At least one of them will have a long CL run so that will pile more pressure on them.
5. We'll only need to focus on ourselves and "chip away" at the number of games left (effectively).
If we can manage to win today and on the 31st then it will a MASSIVE step.