In the dressing room, I gathered the players. The usual pre-game anxieties were still there, but they were overlaid with a new, steely confidence. They had faced the fire at Anfield and emerged not just unscathed, but transformed. They believed.
"Listen to that noise," I said, my voice calm and steady, cutting through the low hum of conversation. The distant roar of the crowd was audible even through the thick walls of the dressing room, a constant, rolling thunder. "That's for you. Every single one of you. After Liverpool, the whole world is watching. They're waiting to see if it was a fluke. They're waiting for us to fail."
I walked to the tactics board, where the 4-2-3-1 was laid out. "Burnley are not Liverpool. They will not give us space to run into. They will sit deep, they will be organised, and they will try to frustrate us. They are a wall. And our job today is to be patient, to be intelligent, and to break that wall down, brick by brick."
