http://kassiesa.home.xs4all.nl/bert/uefa/seedel2014.html Quite a few nasty teams could be drawn against us.
Zenit or reunion with Inter is my guess. In a way it's good we'll have a tough team. If by Feb we can beat a decent team, then we can go for the trophy, if not, then we are better off out.
Fiorentina? Another trip to Italy to get attacked by racists. Great. They've got a couple of Premier League players on loan at the moment (Richards, Marin) and one of our old players in Mounir El Hamdaoui. The Moroccan scored his first goal of the season on the weekend in his first appearance of the campaign. Typical! Liverpool will find it hard against Besiktas, in my opinion. Everton have a much easier tie against our old mates Young Boys, who no longer have a plastic pitch. Arsenal have a nice easy draw, somehow, City are in trouble, Chelsea will have a fight on their hands and Celtic are screwed.
Not the easiest draw, fiorentina have seem very useful attackers Juan Cuadrado,Giuseppe Rossi, Mario gomes and obviously michah Richards will be well up for it. But still better than a trip to mother Russia.
Great draw. Old respected name in football, just what we need to get things interesting at this stage of the competition.
Really? They seem to still be getting very good results at home in Europe(won their last game and drew against Napoli, I think) so perhaps they've got a good side together, I'd just assumed it was their pitch playing a part.
I'm wrong, apparently. Just checked it and they switched back to synthetic crap in the summer. Liverpool will probably face an equally ****e surface in Turkey, though. They might have good memories of the stadium, but the pitch is bloody awful now.
I don't blame them. I've just looked up their group record this season and they won all 3 home games(including against Napoli) scoring 9, conceding 0. Away from home they beat the group whipping boys and lost the other 2 as comfortably as they won the home games. The evidence is pretty clear that teams shouldn't be allowed to play on these plastic pitches, or crappy pitches in general. UEFA should enforce a rule that means all teams have to play on a grass pitch(whether their own ground or another) in their competitions and make sure teams put a certain amount of their prize money towards pitch maintenance. For the clubs that already look after their pitch it won't make a difference as they'll already be spending that money but those that neglect it will have to finally start addressing the problem. There's absolutely no excuse for clubs like Besiktas to have such a poor pitch, they're always in Europe and spending significant amounts on players. Don't even get me started on their floodlights
To be fair to them, for the pitch at least, they're currently having a new ground built on the site of their old one, something which we should be able to relate to. Why their national stadium has a surface more suited to an allotment is more debatable, though. The floodlight situation was farcical and rather suspicious, frankly and UEFA's silence on it is exceptionally poor.
Absolutely. Considering the timing of the blackouts(especially the second) and the corruption in Turkish football it is very concerning. Add into that ITV reporting that all the other electrical facilities were still running suggests that the problem was with the floodlights themselves and you can't fix broken floodlights as quickly as they did. You can power them up again in about 10 minutes though.
I like the Europa KO draw again. I tend to hope we'll play a side with some reputation and history to add some interest for the players and the fans. I dreaded another long commute, and would worry about playing a team like Young Boys we're supposed to beat. In my twisted point of view, you want a reasonably strong team in the first knockout round. That way, if you win, you gain some confidence, and if you aren't good enough, you're done with the Sunday games earlier. Fiorentina is placed similarly in Serie A to Spurs in the PL. It looks like a dead even matchup, so let the best team win. As long as its Spurs.
