Have you people ever heard of a bus? No need to walk.
The Europa League is a bit like the Olympic Football Tournament. Everyone who's not in it thinks it's rubbish. For the teams and fans playing in it, it is interesting to play other sides than the national ones. Of course, the English are the exception to the rule and their fixation on themselves may very well be a reason for their poor national performance.
Juventus, Liverpool, Inter, Real Madrid, Feyenoord, Bayern Munich have all won the UEFA Cup; Manchester United, Arsenal, Rangers, Barcelona, Anderlecht, Milan, and again bayern have won the CWC. Hardly small clubs in either one. But by siphoning them off into the mega-expanded Champions League they deprived the smaller competitions of their relative value.
mitsho said:
However, the reform thoughts for the Champions League goes the other way. Make it a 64 team tournament and lose the Europa League completely. I really hope they don't. But what else can you do? The problem with the CL is a) that it's always the same teams and b) that the group stage is long drawn out with not much to lose which makes the last round a joke. The problem with the Europa league is that a) there isn't enough money, b) the group stage again and c) that CL 3rd placed teams can enter... I don't think the Thursday date is a problem, after all you then play on Sunday at the home league, which is no difference from Wednesday-Saturday or Tuesday-Friday...
Merge the two competitions? CONMEBOL were forced to start the Copa Conmebol and later the Sudamericana and now the magnificent example of the UEFA Cup that was shown off as great to compete is now scrappable? Why am I not surprised at UEFA's/FIFA's duplicity?
As a long suffering (though not recently) Fulham supporter , I can definitely confirm that the Europa League run of 2 years ago was one of the greatest (extended) sporting moments of my life . I was gutted when they got knocked out this year .
Football (see , I didn't call it soccer) would be foolish to ignore the fans of the smaller sides.
'Is' not 'would be'. But they'll wake up once their accountants show them the graphs and explain to them the benefits of watching
One other thing that doesn't help the Uefa cup is that the third placed champions league teams drop into the competition halfway through and often then become favourites to win the competition even if they generally fail.
Only Rangers can manage to near-win it.
Torres has scored a hat-trick!
It was bound to happen sometime, especially since he's managed to score in an international match.
On topic, Wigan. WTF?
I can't believe how well they are playing. The new Barcelona, I'd suggest, except Wigan would have beaten Chelsea except for two offside goals and an Ivanovic punch which got missed by the ref.
Heh, the're terrible to stand up against. Just as they went up 3-0 I switched channels to check on the Everton and Arsenal games and I thought 'these sods will be 4-0 up at halftime if they carry on like this'. I switche back just to see the ball hitting the net!
Lambert Simnel said:
Any predictions for tomorrow night? I can't watch, which is a wind-up. Not sure I can bring myself to follow text updates online - it's just far too painful in any important game.
Wanna come over? It's merely a few thousand miles of plane travel. But the beer's on me.
Anyway, on the match: Anything can happen at derbies. Hell, we're going into liquidation (probably, perhaps not, but we're excluded from Europe as we don't have a license anyway) and we managed to put three past Sellik -then they put three past us today so never fear.
This same rule applies to the Cup final for you, Sir Lambert. Anything might happen there (you did lose 6-2 to them twelve years ago).
