Catalan giants get a twelfth man in tonight’s UEFA Super Cup
The annual UEFA Super Cup usually serves as little more than an excuse to use Monaco’s exquisite Stade Louis II stadium, and tonight sees Champions League winners Barcelona distract themselves from the start of the domestic season by taking on UEFA Cup winners Shakhtar Donetsk. The game - on ITV1 tonight from 7.45 - may not be a classic, but it will be made a little more interesting by the imminent transfer of Dmytro Chygrynskiy.
The defender and kit man’s nightmare has announced that the game against Barcelona will be his last for the Ukrainian side, as he will sign for a new club on Monday. That new club just so happens to be Barcelona.
Following last week’s defeat in whatever country Shakhtar Donetsk are from, Spurs coach Harry Redknapp warned us that he would be fielding a crappy side for the second leg. His ‘rotation policy’ failed to pay off last night (despite a brilliant opener from Giovani), but the gaffer remained in high spirits:
“The lads were terrific here and we were very unlucky not to win.”If we didn’t have a cup final coming up, I wouldn’t have been looking to rest players.
“No one wanted to win this tie more than I did. It would have been great to go through. We deserved to win and their coach told me so afterwards.”
Their coach told you so, Harry? That’s almost as good as an actual win, right? Presumably, the irony of focusing on a cup final whose prize is a place in the UEFA Cup isn’t lost on you, Mr Redknapp?
Roma’s poor record in England is good news for Arsenal fans
The above table shows all of Roma’s results away to English teams since the Premier League began and the number of times they have failed to score suggests that Arsenal shouldn’t be too worried about conceding an away goal. Here are some stats about the other massive Champions League match tonight between Inter Milan and Manchester United, courtesy of chickendinner:
» Sir Alex Ferguson has triumphed in just one of his twelve previous meetings with Jose Mourinho and that win came at Old Trafford.
» Manchester United are unbeaten in nineteen straight Champions League games and have kept clean sheets in four of their last five away games in the competition.
Blues encouraged by draw, Lilywhites’ Euro hopes dashed
FC Copenhagen 2 / Manchester City 2
The Tame Goal of the Week Award goes to City defender Nedum Onuoha, whose side-foot tap somehow found its way past FC Copenhagen keeper Jesper Christiansen. Mark Hughes’ side should have taken three points, but came away with a better result than Manchester Utd did on their last visit to the Parken Stadium (a 1-0 Champions League defeat in 2006).
Shakhtar Donetsk 2/ Tottenham 0
Tottenham visited a ploughed field in the Ukraine and battled well for most of the game. After the game, ‘Arry said he was still taking the UEFA Cup seriously,” then added that he’ll probably play four seventeen-year-olds in next week’s return leg.
The good officials of the Champions League gathered around the trough in Monaco this afternoon, pausing briefly to pompously remove some plastic footballs from mixing bowls in one of their favourite little rituals.
As per, various pundits and sundry authorities were on hand to discuss the mouth-watering nature of the dance card, while those associated with the managerial side of things vowed not to underestimate anybody, as decreed by UEFA’s guidelines on how to talk to the press at times such as this.
Of the English teams, Liverpool probably feel the men in blazers could have looked harder to find them a couple of soft sides, but at least
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