In its customary interminable and long-winded way, with pots of little footballs and awkward chit-chat, the Champions League draw has taken place!
All four English teams have done… okay. Manchester City got a decent team from Pot 2 and the other three all avoided the biggest Pot 1 beasts.
Mainly, though, it was a Champions League draw chock full of #narrative. Here’s the top five bits.
Battle of Britain
Always a decent chance it would happen and it’s the only place to start here, isn’t it? You can absolutely guarantee our sub-head will be the headline on at least one back page tomorrow despite not really making much sense historically or sportingly. But Liverpool v Rangers is an assuredly spicy meatball and means it’s no longer just Aston Villa fans who wish Steven Gerrard was still Rangers manager. In a draw that had #narrative right out the wazoo that would arguably have been too much. Too much f***ing narrative. Any English team against Any Scottish team is more than enough for anyone thank you very much, and on the back of that win over PSV Rangers will quite rightly believe all things are possible against a suddenly very shaky Liverpool and whichever two other unimportant teams are in the group.
Group of Equality
There are a few different ways to get a ‘perfect’ Champions League draw if you’re a team that doesn’t really expect to win it but finds itself handily placed in Pot 2. On the one hand, there’s a temptation to just enjoy a group against great big bastards. Get yourself a Proper Champions League Group, one that could absolutely never be a Europa League group. You want Real Madrid or Bayern Munich here out of the top pot. You’d probably say Inter or Dortmund out of the third and maybe Marseille from the fourth. Another way is to get the easiest possible group and hope to win it, but there’s no denying that all feels a bit Europa and slightly spoils the fun.
The middle ground, the third way, is to avoid any particularly scary Pot 1 behemoth but get some Proper Teams in Pot 3 and 4. Which brings us to Tottenham and Group D. You’ll hear plenty about Eintracht Frankfurt’s European nous and proven ability in the Europa run to get the job done, but let’s not pretend for a single second they aren’t the weakest team in Pot 1. They finished 11th in a non-vintage Bundesliga last season and are without a win after three games of the current campaign.
It’s the one everyone wanted, and Spurs got it.
But they also got a…
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