A win for Rangers against Brondby and Europa League progress is very much on the cards, yes, we really need Lyon to do us a favour against Sparta Prague but they have their own motivation that could help us.
With the French giants on nine points, a win against Sparta, at home, all but guarantees them top spot and automatic progression to the “proper” knockout stages without the need for a play-off against a Champions League drop-out – the only team that could catch them is us but we would need to repeat the feats of 2008 and our 3-0 win to beat them on the head-to-head record as well as winning all our other games.
This could make a huge difference in our attempts to get second place – as we saw ourselves last season – once progress has been secured there is no point risking key players in what is a packed fixture schedule and Lyon in particular will be expecting to go deep in the Europa League, having two games that they can rotate in without risk is a manager’s dream.
We, obviously, need to play our part by beating Brondby and Sparta in our next two games but on matchday six, we could face a Lyon side without several top players – it would still be a difficult task to get three points, but an awful lot easier than if they were all in the starting XI.
Progress is very much still in our hands starting with Brondby tomorrow night, as fans we are allowed to look further than the game in hand, let’s hope Gerrard and his team are focussed solely on getting three points against the Danes.