SteV

OK, I suppose given your recent history of qualifying for the CL, I can perhaps see that the prize on your side isn’t big enough to warrant having to stomach the prize on their side. How you go about enduring a game where you actively have to want your side, who you like as individuals and it’s not a wanting the manager out situation, to lose, I’m not sure. I think I just wouldn’t attend/watch.

Maybe. Although you’ve seen Arsenal win the league, multiple times. If they were to do it again, although I’m sure very painful in the short term, it wouldn’t be the kind of gigantic event that would be talked about forever. Sunderland winning the league would be on a par with Leicester, and they would, rightfully, dine out on it forever.

I do get all that, and we all do get caught up in our own local rivalries. It just feels like it’s straying into small-time mentality IMO. Obviously, I can say all this comfortable in the knowledge that it would take a footballing event of cataclysmic proportions to ever find ourselves faced with the same dilemma.

If that’s the case then they’re taking it too far IMO. If that was us and Sunderland were going for the title (yes, pigs flying etc) surely you’d just have to suck it up and have them win it, rather than be significantly detrimental to your own club.

Which is all very well, and very understandable, but what if Villa lose a couple, and suddenly you winning gets CL football…

14th May has the potential to have you in a right tricky spot…

Only 12 starts like. *actually that’s not counting the FA Cup, so may be a handful more

That seems a reasonable explanation.

There’s a story behind this that the world needs to hear. Also, he can’t have had much kip!?

Two of them played on Sunday like, so you would think if it were them they’d have left them out given the circumstances. Mind you their track record in dealing with this kind of thing is….

We gonna have a process of elimination whereby, one by one, each club comes out and says it’s not their players?

Ah yes, I always get them confused with Maritimo for some reason, so was thinking we’d played them.

How do Braga fall into that category for you?

As an apropos to nothing, here’s the teams currently on course to be in the ECL (and no, I can’t be arsed to find out why there’s six pots)

You’re right of course, but the differential between EL and ECL is tiny compared to the differential between EL and CL, so the idea of it being ‘easier to win’, has a fair bit more sway.