Thursdays, 7.30pm, Channel 5. Get acquainted with this format for midweek viewing, Mancunians, because against-all-odds, that is what you are going to have to get used to.
The exit of England’s top two from Europe in all meaningful footballing sense of the word has shaken up all our preconceptions of English dominance on a club level, and whilst the debate goes on as to whether or not this will benefit United and City – on some levels it will; Suralecks should look to give youngsters like Ravel Morrison and Paul Pogba a shot at Europe, whilst Man City will merely view it as a minor setback in their plan for petro-dollared world domination – or indeed benefit the Champions League as a whole – frankly, any competition which features the utterly nutty fans of APOEL Nicosia is fine by me – I’d like to draw our focus in today’s lesson to the question of the Premier League’s position on the footballing ladder.
My argument in the past has always been that if you mixed the excitement of the Bundesliga and the quality of La Liga, you’d get the English league. However, the extent to which German runaway leaders Bayern Munich strolled to victory in Group A, casting aside English runaway leaders Man City at home and giving them a run for their money with their reserves away, has shown just how far the German league has come since the wider world cast them with the same disinterested glance as the Greek Superliga or the Polish Ekstraklasa. Bayer Leverkusen deserve their place in the last 16 as well, having beaten Chelsea on the way, and Borussia Dortmund were unfortunate to miss out.
As for Spain, you only have to look at the near-inevitability, draw permitting, of a Real-Barca final at the Allianz Arena next May. Real stormed a group that contained the tricky spectres of Ajax and Lyon (more fierce reputations there than Basel and Galati, surely) with a 100% record and 19 goals in six group games, one more win but one less goal than their deadly Catalan rivals. Manchester United meanwhile could muster no more than a couple of scrappy victories over the pointless Romanian debutants – one of which, a 2-0 away victory, came thanks to two penalties – before their deserved downfall, which came entirely unnoticed by a national press concerned only with trying to swirl up the possibility of Andre Villas Boas being sacked at Stamford Bridge.
To see why Man Utd could look forward to a glamorous midweek Euro night at the Britannia Stadium, deconstruct their squad – would Barca or Bayern take any interest in Evans, Fabio, Rafael, Anderson, Fletcher, Gibson or Owen? Yet these are the players Lord Ferguson relies on.
So where does this leave the Premier League as a whole? Well, the fact that the ‘other two’ from Spain – Villareal and Valencia – were in turn abject and beaten by one of England’s ‘other two’ shows that, Real and Barca notwithstanding, the rest of the two leagues are similar – Atletico and Villa, Granada and Norwich, Gijon and Wigan, all are equally poor.
However, keep an eye on those pesky Germans; with an eminently efficient youth system that has put them on the verge of international glory, a brilliantly close yet still high quality domestic scene, and the one club that could stop the Spanish march to their own home ground in the form of Bayern; the Bundesliga may sneak up on the rails to claim the crown of Europe’s top league competition.
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