Some commentators like to present the north-west of England as the heartland of football, a claim to rile other regions with long-established and cherished histories of the sport. With both man Manchester clubs (sorry Rochdale, you’re not one of them) exiting the Champions League, the backlash can begin. The two Mersey sides – Liverpool and the Liverpool Reserves, whoops, bit of Bill Shankly creeping in there; I mean Liverpool and Everton – didn’t even make the grade to enter European competition and aren’t doing great now, the Anfield outfit most pertinently given that more than £100 million has been invested in the squad in less than a year. Furthermore, three Lancashire teams – Blackburn Rovers, Bolton Wanderers and Wigan Athletic – occupy all three relegation spots and, noting their size of each, there are no guarantees that they would bounce back straightaway if any or all were to fall through the trapdoor. This heart(land) is diseased.
In top European football, the responsibility rests with London to deliver for England, even though none of its clubs have won the European Cup (though Chelsea and Arsenal have both finished runners-up in recent years). For Manchester City, this is a blip as the priority until May is becoming Premier League champions. Even for Manchester United, despite failing in a group of ridiculous ease, they have gone one better than the last time they were out of elite European competition before Christmas, finishing third, not fourth as they did in 2005, thereby dropping into the Europa League. With their domestic travails (trailing in the Premier League with insipid performances, losing at home to second tier Crystal Palace in the League Cup and drawn away to Man City in the FA Cup), this could be their best chance of a trophy this season because they were not going to overcome Barcelona in 2012 at the top table.
Man Utd’s conquerors Basle (from Basel) deserve this after the former very luckily overcame a 3-2 deficit to the Swiss at Old Trafford to make it 3-3 in the last minute. They add to the exotica of the knockout stages with Apoel Nicosia becoming the first Cypriot side to make the cut. England’s UEFA coefficient vis-à-vis their nearest rivals Spain should not be too badly dented as both associations saw two clubs progress and two exit. What is interesting is that Italy is back. Three of their teams make the last 16, while Udinese pushed Arsenal close in the 3rd qualifying round. Despite Inter Milan winning the Champions League in 2010, Italian football has been in the doldrums. In fact, Internazionale getting their hands on the ‘cup with the big ears’ is the main reason why this season Serie A had four entrants to the European cream of the crop, when previously and from August 2012, they will only have a trio, losing out to Germany who will be more nervous now, with only Bayern Munich and Bayer Leverkusen making it to the resumption in February.
Zenit St Petersburg and CSKA Moscow will be the representatives of Russia in the knockout section and their tandem will do a far better job of promoting their country on the European stage than that of Vladimir Putin and Dmitry Medvedev. Under their tutelage, corruption has flourished in the Federation so vigorously that they can’t even rig an election properly. It is reminiscent of the incompetence in Zimbabwe and Iran with their botched attempts at ballot fraud. It is unthinkable that Putin won’t be president next year (not least because he is still relatively popular), but United Russia, the political party that he leads (yet, intriguingly, is not a member of), has suffered a bloody nose with a drop of 15% support of the ‘electorate’ since last time. Mikhail Gorbachev, a man with 2% approval ratings in his homeland, once again makes the wrong call, on this occasion demanding a re-run of the vote. That will merely allow the authorities to get it right in stealing the plebiscite. The protests in Moscow are not even on the same scale of the Orange Revolution, let alone Tahrir Square. It was smart of the police to let them go ahead and arrest them, so they can be identified in the future. Putin’s Russia looks shabby yet it is no danger of toppling yet.