Thank you guys so much for the support and nice comments! 
Only PAOK stop us from qualifying for the Champions League
I've literally just gotten home from the airport and I'm exhausted..but I'm glad to say I came home with a win and I came home knowing that the Champions League is in reach and no longer a dream but slowly turning into reality.
Two days ago, the squad flew out to Belgium for our second leg match vs Zulte Waregem. With a two goal advantage, we were tipped to go through. I told the players to focus when defending but when attacking to be clinical as all we needed was one more away goal to put the game to bed. Zulte were fired up, after all we defeated them already and they wanted Champions League football as much as we do, to bad that only one team could advance to the next stage, and that team was Olympique Lyonnais.
It was a chilly evening in Belgium, so cold I had to wear my coat. Not the Arséne Wenger type coat but a thick coat to keep me warm. The stadium we played in was the biggest, wasn’t the best…I doubt it was UEFA standard but it wouldn’t affect us from playing our game and getting the job done.
I gave the team the exact same team talk as I did back in Lyon, because I wanted the exact same performance from them. Complacency wouldn’t be accepted here, if we were to lose this game and tie, we would only have ourselves to blame for not finishing it off, but I wasn’t prepared to go through all that stress, all they had to do is get the job done and score a goal.
Throughout the game we dominated, Zulte showed us far too much respect and it was almost as if they were playing with fear. It was something you normally see in Sunday league football where you have a team with midgets versus a team with giant muscular lads. Of course, we knew we couldn’t underestimate them, but it gave us extra confidence and we knew we could relax a bit.
After the tenth minute, Briand opened the scoring with a thunderous volley; it almost ripped the poor net. Lacazette chipped it up and he smashed it with the outside of his foot, a very good goal. From that point onwards, we only had half chances to score but at least we were keeping the ball and passing well. We had gotten that crucial away goal and now we could relax a bit.
Before I had even gotten out for the second half I could hear the home fans cheering and I saw the Zulte players celebrating. I asked Andre what happened, he told me Gonalons conceded a penalty and they scored but it was an arguable penalty. Arguable or not, I was a bit disappointed that we conceded a goal. By disappointment soon turned into joy as Benzia and Umtiti ramped in two clever goals to kill the game off. The game ended 3-1 to us but 5-1 on aggregate.
The draw for the next round was being shown in our hotel and I gathered all the players to watch it. There was one team that nobody wanted to play, that team was Arsenal. They’ve strengthened their squad greatly with the signing of Flamini and Ozil. Playing Arsenal would have been a disaster. We were the second last team to be drawn and all the other big boys, including Arsenal had been drawn. The squad let out a sigh of relief as we were drawn with PAOK. Just two more wins and we’re in the Champions League I told them, just two more wins.
