The romance of football is wonderful just so long as you don’t have to watch it too often. While respecting a runty, underfunded and frankly unentertaining team that knocks out an illustrious club, many people have to suppress a sense of regret. It’s bad form to say out loud that you’re going to miss the star players who have just been eliminated.
At Euro 2004, though, the impatience with unexpected victors did break cover. You could admire Greece’s organisation, puzzle over their tirelessness and lambaste more celebrated football nations for their inertia and vanity, but everyone knew that the tournament had suffered. But that was only an extreme case of the same condition whose first symptoms had been felt several weeks before in Gelsenkirchen.
Marvellous as it was to see a break in the Champions League trophy’s tour of Germany, Italy, Spain and (once) England, Porto’s victory over Monaco was not wholly satisfying.
Bystanders, petulant and demanding as we are, would really prefer to have at least one set of celebrities in the final.
The couch potatoes may have been annoyed, but their irritation is as nothing to the consternation felt in Milan, Madrid and, come to that, Manchester. The Champions League, in the 13th season of its history as a rebranding of the European Cup, should be revitalised by the need for so many club presidents and managers to think again.
They had definitely failed to appreciate the consequence of the altered format. Arsène Wenger, whose Arsenal team beat PSV Eindhoven this week as the competition proper started, has commented on the effect of dropping the second group phase and replacing it with two-legged ties. His club did not suffer, but the knockout format dented many a budget.
Real Madrid, eliminated in the quarterfinals, were just one of the clubs with far fewer fixtures and therefore less income than anticipated. There is nothing like a shortfall to make people hard-headed and the club has taken the near-inconceivable step of buying two centre-halves,
Walter Samuel and Jonathan Wood-gate, as well as Michael Owen.
Their squad still looks comparatively slight and the demands made of Zinedine Zidane and a few key players do not diminish as they get older, but Real will be devastated if they do not escape the last eight on this occasion. Manchester United did not even get as far as that last season.
Porto accounted for them in the last 16. With Sir Alex Ferguson’s team already lagging in the Premiership, there will be a rush to write them off in Europe. There, however, time is on their side. Like Arsenal and Chelsea, they are not in a daunting group and, during the weeks ahead, United may be able to settle Rio Ferdinand and Wayne Rooney into the line-up without risking ruin.
Chelsea, with the efficiency of wealth, replaced the strategic flakiness of Claudio Ranieri with the steely organisational skills of Jose Mourinho. His side is still looking mechanical in attack, but there should be months of Champions League action in which to grow more supple.
Mourinho and Ferguson are joined by Rafael Benitez as managers of English representatives who have already won European tournaments. The latter took the Uefa Cup with Valencia just a few months ago, but the advantage that Liverpool enjoy through his expertise is offset by the discomfort of sharing Group A with Monaco and Deportivo la Coruna. It would be bad manners, though, to complain within earshot of Martin O’Neill, whose Celtic must contend with Barcelona and Milan.
There ought to be some sort of arms limitation treaty to prevent the Liga club from adding the firepower of Deco, Ludovic Giuly and Henrik Larsson to the squad, but Milan have taken another course. Jaap Stam has been signed to aid Alessandro Nesta and Paolo Maldini, the ageing defender who can still repel forwards and the advancing years.
They hold an advantage not just because the squad that took the Champions League in 2003 has been improved with the advent of men like Kaka, but also because defensive matters have been addressed.
Admirable clubs such as Arsenal still have a certain vulnerability and, of all the grandees, it should be Milan who come out on top this season. —