Spectator Sport

21 March 2009

Soccer’s suits will be in Nyon, Switzerland on Friday pulling out the balls for the final stages of the European Football competitions and I confess I’m looking forward to it with a nameless sense of dread, as American Psycho Patrick Bateman observed. I’ll be hoping that Barcelona and Bayern Munich manage to avoid the same old quartet of English clubs that squat over the later stages of the Champions League these days like the baleful spaceship in Independence Day.

The eight matches, home and away, involving the Big Four in the previous round produced only two really memorable highlights. The Liverpool home leg against Real Madrid, and the Arsenal/Roma penalty shoot-out: the rest was highly skilful, professional, victorious of course, but forgettable. Not to mention financially disastrous, as I’d gone with the stats that said no recent winner had progressed beyond the last 16 and invested in Mourinho’s Inter to qualify at the expense of Fergie’s Manchester United. Ha! Fat chance as it turned out.

Anyway, Liverpool’s slaughter of Real Madrid was so one-sided as to be painful: Madrid were barely in the game. The huge European football nights of the past, when you could see great continental teams go head to head, or when Manchester United or Liverpool would try to bring down one of the European giants, feel like distant memory. If Chelsea play Man U, or Arsenal are up against Liverpool this spring, they will be great nights, but not great European nights. It will be like yet another Sky SuperSunday, with knobs on.

The sheer scale of the domination now is extraordinary. No Premier League team has been knocked out of Europe’s elite competition by a non-British club since Milan defeated Liverpool in the 2007 final. We all know why of course: the incomprehensible amount of money swilling round the Premier League has meant that the best players come here, and the traditional British strengths of physical power and pace have now been allied to technique because so many technically brilliant foreign players work here and have brought along their British team-mates — to such an extent that I think Capello’s England will qualify for the World Cup without dropping a point. So say it again, we have just seen Real Madrid brushed aside by Liverpool, torn apart by some of the finest football we’ve seen this term. That’s Real Madrid, who have won this trophy more times than anyone else.

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