It’s taken an absolute eternity to get here, but the Champions, Europa and Conference Leagues have now all reached a point of familiarity. It’s the last 16, it’s proper two-legged European knockout football, and there are six English teams involved and if that wasn’t already enough there’s also a Madrid derby. It is, in short, a very Big Midweek indeed.
Game to watch: PSG v Liverpool
“It has taken me a while to understand this new format but I’m now 100 per cent sure it doesn’t matter if you end up first or second.
“Because we are guaranteed to play the team that is 15th, 16th, 17th or 18th, and then it’s down to the draw. We can’t drop to third. It has no impact on the league table.”
Arne Slot was right in his calculations before the final league phase game and right to say the quiet part out loud about the inherent and fundamental flaws baked in to the new European format with which he and indeed all of us have been getting to grips.
As it was, Liverpool lost that final game and with it their flawless record in the competition but still finished top of the pile anyway.
The universe, though, did not care for Slot’s frank exposing of the format’s flaws and has punished him greatly.
Because while Liverpool’s final league phase game may have been irrelevant, other final games were not. Into that 15th place leapt Paris St-Germain with their third straight win after a miserable start to the competition, and the draw (plus a facile play-off dismissal of fellow Ligue 1 side Brest) did the rest.
Liverpool’s reward for securing one of the two theoretically easiest paths through the knockout is to start that path against a fellow – if at this level distinctly underachieving – superpower.
The luck of the draw remains a small factor even in a format designed to minimise it, but Liverpool do have reason to feel slightly grumpy about its outsized influence when their reward for finishing first is PSG and, say, Villa’s for finishing eighth is Club Brugge.
Still, got to beat everyone haven’t you, to win the big trophies? Also no, that is not and never has been the case. You only have to beat some of the teams. Liverpool have been incredibly unlucky, but do now have to just crack on with it.
The good news is that, fast finish to the league phase or no, the current iteration of PSG is not the strongest vintage in recent years despite its predictable dominance in Ligue 1.
A Liverpool side that enjoys a Paris-esque domestic advantage of its own and has even had the benefit of a full week off – almost unheard of for English sides ahead of European endeavour – should be feeling pretty good about sorting out the Champions League’s perennial underachievers.
Team to watch: Arsenal
There was a quiet serenity to Arsenal’s saunter through the league phase of this competition that is, dare we say it, slightly out of character.
There’s usually some kind of drama with Arsenal, the club where for good or ill every game is treated like a cup final with all the subsequent dizzying highs and crushing lows.
Is this, perhaps, the single most damning criticism of the new format? That even Arsenal could occasionally drop points without anyone acting like the sky was falling in? Certainly the response to the two games Arsenal failed to win didn’t feel anything like the response to such an outcome in the Premier League where the difference between first and second or third is, as Arsenal know better than most, of vast rather than utterly trivial significance.
But it wasn’t just the lack of surrounding noise and nonsense. Arsenal were, for the most part, just very good indeed in managing their way through that new eight-match phase. A record of 16 goals scored and three conceded with six wins points to a team that was quietly and consistently impressive.
Their four home wins saw Arsenal score nine goals without reply, with PSG impressively swept aside, while away from home there was a standout thrashing of a forlorn post-Ruben Amorim Sporting in Lisbon.
They have been rewarded with a last-16 clash against the second-best team in the Netherlands who have won just one of their last six. Arsenal could dearly, desperately do with a return of the Champions League anthem heralding a return to that previous sense of calm serenity.
Harder now that it’s knockout football where everything matters; harder still when Arsenal’s creaking season is one currently in danger of unravelling and in which this competition represents surely the final chance of salvation with the league title charge lying in striker-less ruins.
READ: Man Utd in relegation zone: Ranking every Premier League club’s striker options
Manager to watch: Ange Postecoglou
Let us not dwell on the oceans of unpleasantness that have led here, but Ange Postecoglou now finds himself in a frankly unprecedented situation as Tottenham manager. He is able to focus all his efforts entirely on a very plausible stab at winning the Europa League.
He is the first Spurs manager who can approach a Europa League knockout stage fully focused upon that task without Daniel Levy whispering the infamous, dangerous, distracting words ‘top four’s our everything’ in his shell-like.
He’s even able to approach the first leg of the last 16 on the back of a full week off after a league game in which he was able to rest Dejan Kulusevski and other weary sorts because like a maverick Australian genius he has somehow contrived the one and only possible situation in which league results no longer matter at all for Tottenham.
Postecoglou’s team selection for the 1-0 defeat to Man City last week made plain what we all suspected. With the small but previously very real threat of relegation extinguished by three straight league wins, Spurs have now cheerfully placed every last one of their few remaining unbroken eggs in the Europa League basket.
Until now Postecoglou would sooner have addressed a journalist by his name instead of ‘mate’ than leave Kulusevski or Son Heung-min out of a Premier League starting XI. Against City he left out both.
Should seedings hold, Spurs have AZ Alkmaar, Eintracht Frankfurt, Lazio and Athletic Club between them and a banter-ending trophy. Not easy, but tantalisingly achievable for a team that can now prioritise its Thursday nights over its Sunday afternoons without a second thought.
But step one is, of course, to avoid the Spursiest of all responses to such an opportunity when they travel to an AZ Alkmaar side they have already beaten once in this competition.
Player to watch: Marcus Rashford
There he is, just like that, back in the Champions League. Who knows how long it will be before his still technically current Manchester United team-mates can say likewise.
The potential involvement of Rashford is not the only good news for an Aston Villa side who took advantage of both a kind FA Cup fifth-round draw and helpful scheduling in being able to complete formalities against Cardiff all the way back on Friday night. As a collective, England do possess an uncommonly well-rested group of clubs for these opening last-16 engagements.
Marco Asensio is another player enjoying himself after a January move to Villa Park, and he too could make his European debut for the club, as could Axel Disasi.
Perhaps most significantly of all, though, Pau Torres could return. His calming presence has been missed in Villa’s defence and he – like Rashford and Asensio – also brings significant big-game European experience to a squad that remains in general short of it. With Tyrone Mings – who conceded that bizarre penalty when Villa met Club Brugge in the league phase – and Matty Cash also back in contention, everything does seem to be coming up Villa ahead of a tie that represents a wonderful opportunity of going deeper still on their first return to European club football’s top table since the early 80s.
READ: Club Brugge vs Aston Villa predicted line-ups, how to watch, referee and stats
This Is Manchester United Football Club We’re Talking About to watch: Manchester United
Look, we had to cheat, okay? There are five English clubs in Proper European action this week (sorry Chelsea) and the traditional Big Midweek format allows for only four. That wouldn’t do, would it?
We did think about being Very Clever Indeed and making Real Sociedad v Man United the ‘European game to watch’ but then we remembered the Madrid derby. So we’ve just had to outright cheat and give them a new one-off category all of their own. Sorry about that.
After fumbling their FA Cup chances against Fulham United find themselves wearier than the other English teams in action this week and also, like Arsenal and Spurs, in a situation where Europe represents the last possible source of trophy-winning season-salvaging exploits. But let’s face it, much more like Spurs than Arsenal.
But even then, still different. Not because they aren’t as bad as Spurs, they clearly are, but because their needs are nevertheless not quite the same. Manchester United have a new manager just starting out, for one thing.
More significantly, though, United are such old hands at the ‘nab a trophy to apply a sticking plaster over the gaping, festering wounds of a once-proud football club’ trick that even winning the Europa League probably wouldn’t really shift the needle all that much.
There is not the same desperate need for validatory silverware here as is starting to develop at Arsenal and consumes Spurs.
Still, though. Be nice, wouldn’t it? And it’s going to be a grim going-through-the-motions end to the season for United if they don’t even have Europe to distract them from those ongoing domestic travails.
READ: Manchester United, Amorim, Arsenal and West Ham feature heavily in ten biggest cock-ups this season
Football League game to watch: Hull City v Plymouth Argyle
A cup run that included an all-time-great win over Liverpool and giving Man City a proper scare at the Etihad was tremendous fun but it’s over now and for Plymouth it’s straight back into the meat-and-potatoes of a monumental relegation scrap at the foot of the Championship with an extremely hefty six-pointer at Hull.
As so often seems to be the case when a relegation fight reaches the business end, teams down there are starting to eke out wins where they were not eked out before, and all of the three teams directly above them – including Hull – have managed one since Plymouth last did so three games ago.
This would seem an extremely opportune time to pull a first away win of the season out of the fire. It would take the Pilgrims above Luton from the same number of games played and level on points with Tuesday’s opponents.
Win by 11 goals and they would leapfrog Hull too, but even for a team possessed with all the magic of the FA Cup that’s probably a bit much to ask.
European game to watch: Real Madrid v Atletico Madrid
New format, same Real Madrid. They may have been unconvincing and vulnerable at times during the league phase, but something happens to this club when the Champions League gets real. They are the undisputed masters of Big Cup knockout football and had no fears over a play-off round challenge against Man City.
The fallen English champions were duly dispatched, and now Carlo Ancelotti’s side have their local rivals in their crosshairs. A fixture that has twice been the final in recent years, and twice found its inevitable conclusion despite Atleti leading into the 93rd minute on one occasion and taking the other to penalties.
Real Madrid find a way. They will probably do so again despite Atletico Madrid still being everything you could want in a Champions League knockout team apart from the obvious one thing they can never be: their intensely annoying neighbours who have in the last 11 seasons alone won this competition more times than all but three other clubs have managed in their entire histories.
Nothing perhaps sums up better these two clubs’ contrasting relationship with this competition than the fact Real Madrid (15 titles) and Atletico (0 titles) have both lost the same number of finals.
