Tottenham, Inter and this week’s Europa League picks

Hugo Greenhalgh looks at the Europa League matches worth watching this week…

Due to the size of its fixture list, and the obscure nature of the teams involved, the Europa League holds a strange sort of voyeuristic appeal for non-involved fans to enjoy from afar. Sometimes derided by English fans, it can offer a wonderful and rare glimpse into the less-travelled ecosystems of European football, especially with regards to the continents’ more obscure smaller sides.

Such is the scale of this leviathan, season-long tournament, and the format of its qualifying phase, 137 teams have already taken part in this year’s competition. This number will be whittled down to 48 after the Play-Off Round that begins this Thursday.

To help you find your footing and make sense of it all, we present the four picks of the latest round of qualifiers…

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Europa League’s English trio: the West Broms of Europe?

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Simon Smith looks at the changing English perceptions of the Europa League…

This week the Europa League reaches the crunch stage, the quarter finals.  All the teams that get through this will fancy their chances of winning the tournament and there are no sloppy teams let in the running.  So why the three English clubs?  Traditionally this stage of the competition has eliminated them by now, so are we looking at a newfound interest in the competition by Premier League clubs or are there other reasons for the current success?  Take a look at the current teams involved, compare them to recent seasons and the mystery becomes a little clearer…

Tottenham Hotspur, Chelsea and Newcastle are all good teams, but none of them are great teams.  There have in the last few seasons been two different classes of English club in Europe’s junior cup and for different reasons neither have had the ability to make significant progress in the tournament: clubs with desire but who lack the quality, and clubs with the quality who lack interest. Continue reading

Do away with Away Goals?

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Simon Smith bemoans the away goal, whose place in European football is fast becoming redundant…

We had some controversial European ties in the last round of games, and the Nani sending off aside it was the away goals rule that took the brunt of complains. With Champions League quarter finals just around the corner it’s time to answer the question of whether the same will happen again. Should we all just accept the rule as how even ties are decided or is this the time to question it? It’s certainly been a while since I came across a defender of the rule… The usual complaints surround its unfairness: that it unjustly punishes the home team in the second leg of a tie, or kills a match because a fluke keeper error can have the significance of conceding “effectively two goals”. Is that really such a disaster? Continue reading

This One’s for the Neutrals

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Can we work out who is the Premier League’s ‘most neutral’ team? David Wild puts it to the test…

‘This is one for the neutrals’; English football has thrown this phrase our way an awful lot recently.  If we look at some recent cases from the League and FA Cup we can see in the cup runs of Bradford and Oldham a classic example of a national complex; the celebration of the plucky underdog.

When we see a team performing in a way that we admire our hearts go out to them, they achieve a kind of universal admiration. In these cases the admiration came from both teams performing beyond the expectations of teams of their quality in beating premier league opposition. Continue reading

Russian Football in Like a Lion

SOGAZ-RFPLThe False Nine’s Russian correspondent Andy Shenk rounds up the action from Week 21 of the Russian Premier League…

When the Russian Premier League resumed play on March 8, following the winter break, the table was split into three distinct groups. Three clubs had risen above the pack, CSKA, Anzhi and Zenit, separated by five points in the chase for the title and one of two Champions League spots. Beginning with Kuban, Terek and Spartak, all clumped six points beneath 3rd-place Zenit, another seven teams enjoyed an excellent chance at snagging one of Russia’s four Europa League places, awarded to clubs 3rd-5th in the league as well as the winner of the Russian Cup. Continue reading

Is the Premier League really in decline?

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David Wild takes issue with the idea that the Premier League is in decline…

The reports of my death have been greatly exaggerated – Mark Twain

The First knockout rounds of the Champions League draw to a close this week. It is widely expected that for the first time since 1995-96 there will be no English team in these quarter finals. Combine this with what some domestic observers see as a steady decline in league quality over the past three years and we perhaps should begin to fear for the health and future of the English Premier League.

This season in particular is one where performers like Brad Guzan are praised for their top tier class, despite conceding 49 goals in 26 league games. The decline of the Premier League can perhaps most strikingly be found in the defensive statistics. Continue reading

Quarterfinals Tempt Russian Trio

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Andy Shenk previews the Russian trio vying for progression to the quarterfinal stage of the Europa League…

Russian football’s winter break is finally over. Tonight, three clubs, Zenit, Anzhi and Rubin, continue their Europa League campaign in the round of 16. Tomorrow, the first two Russian league games in 2013 coincide with International Women’s Day: Volga Nizhny Novgorod – Kuban and Krasnodar – Amkar.

Last season, four clubs made it to the knockout phase of European football, but all four, Zenit, Rubin, CSKA and Lokomotiv, failed to advance past the first round and turned their attention to the home stretch of the 15-month 2011/2012 Russian Premier League season, which ran from March 2011 to May 2012 in order to implement the league’s fall-spring switch.

The scheduling change had one primary motive: improved performances from Russian clubs in European competition. Though Spartak and Zenit struggled last autumn in the Champions League group stage, the nation has bounced back nicely in the Europa League.  Continue reading