CHAMPIONS LEAGUE DRAW
All the quarter-final and semi-final fixtures will published here
Representatives of all eight Champions League semi-finalists are gathered in Nyon for the draw, which was scheduled to start at 11am. You haven’t missed anything yet though - just UEFA general secretary David Taylor explaining how they manage to make such a simple process so complicated and a few video packages being shown to drag things out. The full draw will be published below as soon as the serious business begins:
Quarter-final draw:
Villarreal v Arsenal
Manchester United v Porto
Liverpool v Chelsea
Barcelona v Bayern Munich
Semi-final draw:
Manchester United/Porto v Villarreal/Arsenal
Barcelona/Bayern Munich v Liverpool/Chelsea
Interesting stats:
» The side drawn to play the second-leg at home have won the previous three Chelsea/Liverpool Champions League clashes - handing the Blues the advantage.
» Porto eliminated Manchester United the last time they met them in the knockout stages.
» Last season every single quarter-final and semi-final was won by the team drawn to play the first leg away. If that happens again we will have an Arsenal/Chelsea final
Tags: Arsenal, Barcelona, Bayern Munich, Champions League, Chelsea, David Taylor, Draw, Liverpool, Manchester United, Nyon, Porto, Quarter-finals, Semi-finals, Villarreal
Posted: March 20th, 2009 by Michael Lintorn
Paranoia
Intellectual Spanish paper sees dark forces behind the three-game closure of the Vicente Calderon stadium

The Spoiler is used to reading stories in the Spanish sporting dailies that compensate for a lack of substance with a hefty dose of local indignation, but the reaction of even the serious Spanish papers to UEFA’s closure of Atletico Madrid’s ground is one of quite hilarious paranoid hysteria.
Instead of seeing the punishment as a response to violence and racism, the very solemn national daily El Pais has chosen to interpret the sentence as firm evidence of jealous French and English football bureaucrats ganging up out of spite for Spain’s sporting excellence.
This is the first paragraph of an editorial that appeared this morning, under the headline “The anglo-french axis and the half-hearted Spanish”
“Just one day after England - quite out of the blue - vetoed playing at the Bernabeu on grounds of racism, UEFA, led by Michel Platini, a Frenchman, and Gordon Taylor (David Taylor actually - Gordon Taylor runs the PFA), a Scot, upheld the

Tags: Atletico Madrid, David Taylor, El Pais, Michel Platini
Posted: October 15th, 2008 by Ed Needham