One Game At A Time? Don't Believe A Word

WE’RE taking each game as it comes’ ‘No one is talking about the R-word (or P-word)’ ‘It is about looking after our selves and not worrying about the others’.

- Glenn Moore

As the season heads towards the business end, you can start ticking off these phrases on the football clichés bingo card, but however, often managers and players repeat them everyone knows they are kidding.

Footballers are human. They will be studying the league table, looking at fixtures, working out the permutations, just like the fans. Occasionally, they admit it.

Liam Rosenior, in his column for The Guardian, described last week how the Brighton & Hove Albion players had discussed after training how many points would be needed to be safe from relegation.

Revealed

Alex Rodman, fresh from scoring against Charlton Athletic last Saturday, to maintain Shrewsbury Town’s remarkable League One promotion push, revealed the players had checked the results of rivals Blackburn Rovers and Wigan Athletic as soon as they got into the dressing room.

While Rodman still insisted “we have got to focus on what we are doing one game at a time”, he had looked far enough ahead to know Blackburn and Wigan were playing each other this weekend while Shrews hosted Peterborough.