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On Sunday, Chelsea will travel to West London to take on Brentford in the 4th round of the FA Cup. It will be a long an arduous journey of about 6 miles, uphill both on the way there and back, no doubt, to Griffin Park, familiar to many as the "home" park of the Chelsea youth teams. It'll be the rarest of West London derbies - Chelsea haven't played Brentford since 1950, haven't lost to Brentford since 1939.
The Bees play (buzz?) in League One (third tier) and are thus approximately 38362 places below Chelsea in the English league pyramid. They may be the home team, but there should be no question as to who's the favorite in this one. There should be goals galore for Chelsea, the floodgates opening early and often, perhaps with an allowance for an early Brentford goal as that tends to happen in matches like this.
What I'm trying to say is that a loss here would be very embarrassing. Probably the most embarrassing thing to happen all season, if not longer. Arsenal-levels of embarrassing. And that just wouldn't do. Should the unthinkable happen on Sunday, I'd be willing to bet good money that the current Interim Manager would get a swift kicking right out the door.
So, the question is, assuming that the above described reaction would be the board's reaction to a loss as well, would it be worth it to you? Would it be worth to lose yet another chance at a trophy in the most embarrassing way possible just to rid the team of the scourge of the RAFALUTION? Or is the damage already done, the floor already reached, so we might as well just ride out the storm - and maybe even stumble into a shiny FA Cup (i.e. the Chelsea Cup) trophy?
Choose wisely.
NB: I changed the title to reflect the tone a little better to what I intended. Nowhere did I mean to advocate deliberately losing to Brentford.