With all the mind games going on ahead of our game against City today, Petr Cech obviously didn’t want to miss out on the opportunity of his own wind-up.
Taking the opportunity to lay down the gauntlet, Cech says “I think they (City) now have even more pressure on them. Let’s say last season, when the club had just been bought and they spent a lot of money, everybody was prepared to say it was a transition year for Manchester City. But now they have been together for quite a long time and this season they don’t have any more excuses and can’t say, ‘We have a lot of new players and need time to settle’. That’s not true because almost everybody was there last season. Everything is possible in football, and you can have a spell where you do not win in three games and everything looks different. I think once you have an advantage of 10 points on anybody, you might feel that it can be a huge help for the rest of the season in terms of putting one of your rivals behind you.”
Obviously Cech’s hinting at the situation they’d find themselves in should we get a result today – and that’s by no means guaranteed. But with just a hint of an unfavourable comparison about it, he goes on “Everybody says money alone can’t buy success. You have to have a good team to win something and you need to have the spirit and the atmosphere in the dressing room and in the club generally, to make the team successful. You can put all the best players together, but that never automatically means you’re going to have a good team. It just depends on how well they do to gel everybody together and how they’re going to grow the team. I think it comes down to the players. You need the players to build that atmosphere in the dressing room. If you have everybody thinking about only their ego, then you can have a great energy, a great squad, great facilities, but you will never have a great team. To be fair, they have a great squad, an experienced manager, all the set-up to win the league, so they now just need to have momentum on the pitch.”
Personally, I happen to agree with everything Cech says and it’s all stuff plenty of us , myself included, have said countless times – I just hope it doesn’t bite him on the arse!
Blue is the colour
