The measure of a team is not how it wins. It is how it responds to losing.
Monday morning at Beckenham. Three days after Chelsea. The car park was full by seven-thirty: every player, every staff member, the entire football operation, present and accounted for. Nobody had called in sick. Nobody had asked for an extra day. They had tasted ash on Saturday, and they had come back hungry.
I stood in the coaching office with Sarah, Rebecca, and Kevin Bray, the tactical board wiped clean, the Chelsea analysis already filed away.
The past was the past. Three matches in eight days that lie ahead: West Ham away on Saturday, Vitória de Guimarães at home on Thursday, Newcastle away on the following Saturday. Three different opponents, three different challenges, and an eighteen-year-old centre-back on crutches in the medical room, reminding us all of what the schedule could cost.
