So our neighbours can face the following in the EL : Sevilla, Napoli, Zenit, Benfica, Kyiv, Inter, Villarreal.
Really? I hope they both win and continue to have to fly around Europe for as long as possible. Loads of midweek games to play, and premier league games on sundays, eventually resulting in both teams being knocked out in the semi finals! Perfect
Absolutely. Kiev this time and St Petersburg in the quarters. Thrashed by any of the others in the semis. As I'm being generous i suppose Chelsea could share the Eastern Europe teams.
Ideally the tie draws will give the Goons and Chelsky either of : 1. Krasnodar or Zagreb in the next round 2. Kyiv or Zenit in the QFs
EL last 16 : Chelsea v Dynamo Kiev Eintracht Frankfurt v Inter Milan Dinamo Zagreb v Benfica Napoli v FC Salzburg Valencia v FC Krasnodar Sevilla v Slavia Prague Arsenal v Rennes Zenit St Petersburg v Villarreal Even a fully bent draw could not have done much better than that. The Napoli tie IMHO is the most interesting one.
Let's be honest though, Arsenal playing any semi-decent European team away from home is pretty much a 50-50 at best. I wouldn't fancy our chances against many of those teams right now. Rennes are 11th in Ligue 1, but the French league is so tight, they are only 4 points behind 4th spot. They also hired a new manager in December and since he's come in, they've won 6 games, drawn 1 and lost 3. So they've not done too badly at all, to be honest. Then you add in the fact Hatem Ben Arfa will be extra motivated for this after the well-documented spats he had with Emery at PSG, and Rennes have a reputation for being a good counter-attacking team with lots of pace in their frontline, the draw doesn't look that straightforward. I'm still expecting us to go through, but it will be tough and, stylistically, Rennes could cause us a lot of problems.
Yeah, fair point. I suppose it would be worse losing in an actual season. Was today's result your 7th loss of the season in the league, by the way? I can't seem to keep up!
7th loss. 3rd loss to Mike Dean. 18% loss rate without. 60% loss rate with and he gave one losing team two penalties.
Or maybe you just aren't good enough? Very few supporters blame the ref for their teams failings like you lot do, how many red cards did he miss today