Chelsea will give Liverpool a guard of honor before the two teams play each other in the Premier League on Sunday. Last weekend, the Reds wrapped up the league title by hammering Spurs at Anfield.
Liverpool still has Chelsea, Arsenal, Brighton and Crystal Palace left to play, with Virgil van Dijk set to lift the Premier League trophy after the final game. In the meantime, it is an English tradition for the champion to be clapped onto the pitch before the game once the league title has been confirmed.
However, not everyone is a fan of the move. “I don’t like it,” Peter Crouch said on TNT Sports during the channel’s coverage of Aston Villa vs Fulham.
“I don’t know… Maybe it shows respect, but I think it’s a bit embarrassing for the team that comes out and it’s highly embarrassing for the team that is clapping them on the field. It’s not for me.”
“I didn’t like it,” Rio Ferdinand added. “I’ve been fortunate enough to receive a guard of honor and be on the receiving end of it, and both are quite awkward. Crouchy is exactly right.”
Whether it is awkward or not, Chelsea boss Enzo Maresca has already confirmed that his players will respect the tradition.
(Image: Chelsea FC)
“It’s tradition,” the Spaniard said during his pre-match press conference on Friday. “We have to do that, and we are going to do that. They won the Premier League, so they deserve it.”
However, the Chelsea boss refuted the suggestion that it would give his players some added motivation to improve next season and put themselves in a position to win the title soon.
“I don’t think we need to give a guard of honor to understand how good it is to win the Premier League,” he said. “We know that it’s something very nice. But for sure, when you are standing there, probably in their minds our players are thinking, ‘I would like one day to be there’.
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“In terms of the gap between us and Liverpool, it is there, you can see this clearly. My feeling is we are [moving] in the right direction and hopefully this gap can be smaller and smaller.
“The difference is they have been consistent compared to us. For part of the season, we were very good, and then we lost some games.
“This has probably been the main reason why the gap is there. And also in terms of experienced players who know how to win games and these kinds of things, I think they have something more compared to us.”
Liverpool.com says: The guard of honor is a weird tradition and the Chelsea players and fans won’t enjoy doing it, but as Maresca says, it has to be done. It would be a very bad look for anyone who didn’t take part in it.
