Sevilla v Valencia Copa del Rey Preview; “Do or Die”

By: Anthony | January 28th, 2009

Tomorrow is the most important match of the season, hands down. This isn’t any championship match, nor is it one to stay in the Primera División, it’s just one of those make or break games.

Let’s face it, our run of form was pretty damn good until we took a bit of a stumble at the Mastalla which was perfectly okay, I mean we were always going to come back home and smash them anyway, but the game on the weekend against Racing, oh God… Horrible, absolutely horrible, I can’t describe in any other words what was probably our worst game ever.

No player playing the way our boys did against Racing should ever be able to wear the rojiblanco, they were a complete disgrace to Sevilla Fútbol Club.

The Copa del Rey is the only thing we have left and if we don’t win it our season is considered a failure. We aren’t going to win the league, Barça’s already done that, this is our only shot at silverware, and to show that we’re a big club, we need silverware, plain and simple.

Jiménez has been hard done by critics in recent weeks, but maybe rightfully so, we’re a top four club, anything less than a win against Osasuna, Mallorca, and Racing Santander are definitely unacceptable. It was rumoured that now Spartak Moscow coach, Michael Laudrup was in Nervión and that he would replace Manolo. That was right before we won those three matches against Deportivo la Coruña in a matter of 1 week and everything suddenly seemed back to normal. I probably wouldn’t advise sacking Señor Jiménez now anyway, but if we don’t get the result tomorrow, he better know it’s coming to him.

Knowing all of this, Jiménez has selected a strange squad to face Valencia at home.

Palop, Javi Varas, Mosquera, Squillaci, Fernando Navarro, Escudé, Adriano, Dragutinovic, Duscher, Romaric, Renato, Cordero, Jesús Navas, Capel, Perotti, Kanoute and Luis Fabiano were selected by Jiménez. Not included in the squad are Chevantón, Maresca (probably due to his comments earlier this week), David Prieto, and Crespo.

Good to see a couple Sevilla Atlético boys in there although I’m not exactly sure this is the time to play them. What surprises me most is no Cheva, I mean you would think that Manolo would have taken his experience instead of Perotti who hasn’t played for the first team before. This is exactly what I mean though, his tactics are so strange, no one ever knows what he’s going to do next. Also strange to see Pukki wasn’t included after his pretty solid debut, would have definitely loved to see him get another run out.

Some good news for us obviously as both Jesús Navas and Konko have been declared match-fit but the latter will not play. However, this will still give us a huge boost as Navas always does down the right flank.

In all honestly I expect my boys to go out and prove everyone (including myself) wrong, we’ll come out on top, I can feel it. The scoreline won’t be as high as in the first leg but I think it is clearly evident that the players will have been shook up from that absolute garbage display at home to Racing on the weekend and will want to prove their worth tomorrow.

It’s all or nothing really, this is all we have left, we lose, that’s our season right there. Sure we will still qualify for Champions League, but what is that compared to winning a major trophy?

The season starts or ends tomorrow, simple as.

¡¡Vamos mi Sevilla
Vamos Campeón!!