Yeovil Town coach and goal-scoring legend Marcus Stewart has told the club’s players to “embrace the pressure” of playing in front of the television cameras at Wrexham this weekend.
The Glovers travel to North Wales to face the high-fly Red Dragons with the ITVX cameras presumably on the look out for their Hollywood owners movie star Ryan Reynolds and Rob McElhenney, the star of hit television show, Always Sunny in Philadelphia, in the FA Cup second round on Sunday.
Stewart reached the semi-finals of the competition as a Sunderland player in 2004, but has also been on the wrong end of an FA Cup upset, not least when he was part of the Yeovil side dumped out of the 2007 competition by lower league Torquay United, including current Glovers’ assistant Chris Todd, who scored twice in a 4-1 win.
Asked by BBC Somerset’s Jack Killah what he thought was needed to pull off an FA Cup shock, the former Ipswich Town striker said: “You need a bit of luck, a bit like the other day (at Welling) when we weren’t at it and the other team were, and you need players to step up when the chances come.
“In recent matches we have had lots of chances and managed to put two or three away, but that might not be the case at the weekend so we need to take our chances.
“We have to match them, get a bit of luck on our side and take our chances when they come and, if you can do that, you have got a chance of getting through to the next round.”
Having taken on big teams in his playing career, including in 1999 when his Huddersfield Town side went down to a Liverpool team including Michael Owen and Steven Gerrard, Stewart said he would tell Yeovil’s players: “Go out and embrace it, embrace the occasion because not many of these players will have had the chance to play a Premier League team and, if we get through this round, that is the potential.
“This group of lads are a good group and they deserve some good headlines but it is not going to be easy. We went there last year with totally different team, a different club and we took them to 60 minutes at 0-0, so hopefully if we can do it in this game, we have a chance and FA Cup giant-killings are on the cards most season.”
“An FA Cup game off the back of a loss is a good one, there’s no pressure on us, we have got nothing to lose.
“If you can get on a good run and earn some money for the club, it is always a positive and going to somewhere like Wrexham there is going to be a feelgood factor. But there’s a feelgood factor in this place as well, the lads have been great this year.
“It is another challenge, another step up from the previous two games (against Southend United and Gateshead) in this competition, but it is a challenge the lads will take I am sure.”