Wow Niang hits the post! Mascherano in for Puyol seemed like a good idea to deal with the pace of Milan's counterattacks but his weakness in the air is problematic. As I type Messi scores again...

So Barca seem like all the "Barca are falling apart" stories have annoyed them. Reminds me of Spain during the Euros and the way they dismantled Italy in the final.

Galatasaray now up on Schalke, too

Another stat of the year candidate.

This is the third match that Barcelona will have played during a Papal Conclave.

They won each of the first two 4-0.

Holy crap it happened it again!

Unreal. Milan looked nervous, but all credit to Barca.

And the same thing happens in the closing minutes in Schalke-Galatasaray. What a super fun afternoon of football.

I admit I don't watch a ton of Serie A but I don't see comparing their attacking ability with Man U, Bayern, Borussia Dortmund, Real, Barcelona, or Man City.

Only Dortmund of those have a young backbone in their attack. And they are resigned to losing Lewandowski this summer.

Apparently the Quataris are planning a huge club tournament called Dream Football League. They want to make it a big deal by throwing money at the teams (of course). UEFA's reaction will be interesting to see.

So it appears the rumblings about a super league were true, if not quite in the form that was expected. Speculation time!

Would the 16 permanent members track closely to the money league? Here is my two minute guess before I have to get back to work in no particular order:

1. Barcalona
2. Madrid
3. Chelsea
4. Man U
5. Man City
6. Arsenal
7.Liverpool
8. PSG
9. Marseille
10. Lyon
11. Bayern
12. Dortmund
13. Ajax
14. Juventus
15. Milan
16. Inter

That's just a quick list. You could probably sub in a few clubs like Spurs over those I picked. As for the other eight in another two minute guess:

1. Spurs
2. Celtic
3. Schalke
4. Napoli
5. Athletico Madrid
6. Shaktar
7. Roma
8.Zenit/random oligarch club

Something like this has been coming for a long time, I'm not sure what could be done about the impact on the domestic leagues from a competitive balance standpoint. Yes the teams that participate might be knackered, but for that kind of blow they could purchase the entire squads of their domestic competitors only off the revenue. I could hand wring, but I'm not because for the all the complaining I could do, I would absolutely watch such a tournament.

Also, who am I kidding, if Liverpool were picked for such a league I'm sure the club could find a few uses for those sweet, sweet petro dollars.

While brushing off continued accusations of corruption surrounding its successful World Cup bid and concerns about human rights issues and extreme conditions for summer football, Qatar has apparently been concocting a plan to form a "Dream Football League" that would involve 24 teams, take place every other summer and begin in 2015.

Umm...

So it would essentially be a giant friendly tournament that people would actually care about? Sign me up.

The Guardian suggests it might be made up.

Doesn't look good for Kay.

A friend reports on Kay's webchat:

Oliver Kay's done a webchat about the story.

He claims the following:
- Cahiers du Football was not the source
- He's "not the kind of journalist to run a story on the basis of a single source"
- At least one of the sources had previously provided good information.
- He disputes Cahiers du Football's claims that they made up the story.
- He says the main source of the story had previously provided good info about PSG and Qatar.

8.Zenit/random oligarch club

Sheriff Tiraspol is the obvious choice! As they come from a city that basically isn't part of its country anyway they would be most at home in this ridiculous transnational scenario.

Outside of Spain, few places in the world can boast more fervent support of Barcelona and Real Madrid than Iraq.

In Iraqi Kurdistan, some 3,5000 miles from the action, locals are obsessed with La Liga's two biggest teams. When they face each other in El Clasico, bars and coffee houses are segregated between rivals fans and police presence is increased as people celebrate, commiserate and fight long into the night.

According to a report in Baghdad newspaper Al Zaman, carried by Spanish newspaper Sport, passion between rival fans spilled over into violence and murder this week.

On Monday, a Barcelona supporter in Madain — a city a few miles south of Baghdad — supposedly argued with a Real Madrid-supporting friend in a gaming arcade. The Barca fan then reportedly "slaughtered" his friend with a knife, in full view of several witnesses.

Arabs Today add the chilling detail that the Madrid fan was actually beheaded by his former friend. An Iraqi Interior Ministry source told them:

"A fight broke out on Monday night at the Games Hall in Aldjaarh, between two friends, one of whom supported Barcelona and the other who supported Real Madrid."

The source added that events took a dramatic turn when the Barcelona fan took out a knife and stabbed his friend several times, before "beheading him in public."

"Witnesses at the Hall captured the offender and called the police, who rushed to the scene and took him to a security centre for interrogation. The dead body was taken to the forensic medical department for a post-mortem."

Lethal finish, that.

ZM's take on the Barca-Milan game is interesting. It seemed that Milan was not pressuring as high as last game and was sitting too far back in their banks of four. (Sort of the classic dumb bunker strategy.) But according to Cox Barca's change of positioning had a lot to do with thwarting Milan's strategy and not allowing them to be in position to come out to mark more closely.

As a big fan of public access television, watching the Russian CL pre-game brings back lots of great memories. Lo-fi rules!

Predictions:

Bayern takes it easy, 1-1.
Porto 2-0 v. a deflated Malaga.

Hail Britannia! (early)

And Arsene eschews the infamous puffy parka amid the flurries.

Edit: Since nobody else is here, I will simply add that the new Pope's non-Papal name has "Goal" right in its pronunciation (Ber-GOAL-io) . I suspect Asian match-fixers.

Dropping Vermaelan and Szechnzy (wasn't even going to try) - I guess is a big deal. This game will definitely be a lot of back and forth.

Per Jonathan Wilson's article today, the Arsenal-Bayern match is definitely harmed by the existence of the away goals rule. Arsenal should be one goal away from a draw / extra time right now.

More importantly, Millwall on the road goes into HT up 1-0 on Blackburn Rovers in the FA Cup replay. To go from losing 0-2 at home to Wolves two games ago to moving on to the FA Cup Semis would be an amazing run. As a Wolves fan, I should know.

Serious dive by Danilo in the Malaga/Porto game. He did it in in his own half and it couldn't have been more obvious.

What pisses me off is not the (charitably) gamesmanship but the ref made a diving motion, barked at him to get up but did not book him. I just hate this crap so much because stuff like this happens just enough to give ammunition to those morons who complain about soccer being "all about diving" or some such stuff. The refs HAVE to crack down on this obvious stuff. They have the right to give a yellow and that absolutely should have been given.

As I type this the ref then lets Danilo get away with a cross check in the box sending the Malaga player headlong into the keeper. Malaga then scored but it was ruled out because of the Malaga player hit the keeper. This ref has had a dreadful five minutes.

Neither team is able to keep possession. The Allianz Arena is very quiet. Any time the Arsenal fans do a chant its pretty clear to hear.

Very happy for Malaga and Pellegrini. Would be something if he got Madrid in the quarters.

As I type this the ref then lets Danilo get away with a cross check in the box sending the Malaga player headlong into the keeper. Malaga then scored but it was ruled out because of the Malaga player hit the keeper. This ref has had a dreadful five minutes.

Not only that, but I'm not convinced Baptista (the Malaga player in that scenario) actually hit the keeper at all, even after being checked by Danilo. It looked to me like the keeper just flat-out spilled it.

Sahin slagging Rodgers it appears. I will allow two things:

1. Rodgers is a dope.

2. Sometimes things tend to get misquoted.

But with those two things in mind, Sahin really needs to shut up. He was a slow, lazy, fragile, fat prima donna pansy who got exposed. He may not be a number 10, but that's what position was available and he actually peformed decently there. It takes quite a lot of nerve to wash out at one club and then wash out at a second on loan and complain that you were only offered playing time at a position you didn't like. Let me just suggest to Mr. Sahin that if you couldn't beat out the likes of Jordan Henderson, Jonjo Shelvey, and Joe Allen while being on several multiples of their wage, it may not be your somewhat addled manager that's the problem.

Look on the bright side, Spurs. Bale's transfer fee just continues to go higher and higher...

Defoe and Adebayor, not making it happen, so far.

Gallas making it happen at the wrong end of the pitch.

Oh Tottenham.

So do away goals still count now that we're in extra time?

Yup, away goals still in play.

Well done nerazzurri. Even managed to get it to ET and drag Spurs through an extra half hour. Nice.

This is officially ridiculous.

Zanetti never fails to amaze. At 39, he's more spry at minute 117 than anyone on the pitch, by quite a margin.

This is officially ridiculous.

The Guardian blog, four minutes after you posted that:

116 min This has been a ridiculous evening

I had the pleasure of watching Zanetti live for four years. He's beyond superlatives.

Wonder if we will start hearing those "the real measure of a league's overall quality is how it does in the Europa League" arguments with an English accent now that they have three teams in the quarters.

Wonder if we will start hearing those "the real measure of a league's overall quality is how it does in the Europa League" arguments with an English accent now that they have three teams in the quarters.

Trying to read too much into single-round elimination matches is largely foolish. My perception of the PL or La Liga wouldn't have radically changed if Real had failed to scrape through against United courtesy of Nani's red card. Barca, Real, United, City, Chelsea, Bayern, Dortmund, Juve, and Milan are basically all close enough that you shouldn't be surprised about any one of those teams beating another. Now I would be fairly comfortable ranking them, but that's based on their much larger body of work (domestically, and past seasons). But a single result shouldn't radically change how you view them. Bayern needing away goals to scrape past Arsenal isn't going to change my mind that Bayern is the clearly better team.

That said, we did have a discussion about the relative depths of the PL and the Bundesliga a while back. And I would take Newcastle, as a bottom half of the table club, being able to make it that far, while all the German teams wiped out, as a data point in support of the position I took in that debate.

Tottenham players were on Thursday subjected to racist chants by Inter Milan supporters, who were also captured on TV waving an inflatable banana.

Spurs lost 4-1 after 30 minutes of extra time but progressed to the Europa League quarterfinals on away goals after the tie finished 4-4 on aggregate.

However, much of the aftermath to the thrilling encounter will likely surround what action governing body UEFA will take against Inter after racism appeared to rear its ugly head.

Press Association Sport said several Tottenham players, notably goalscorer Emmanuel Adebayor, were the target of monkey chants from the Italian team's fans, with one supporter seen on TV with an inflatable banana.

Somehow, managing a Serie A squad in FM 2010 never quite manages to replicate the, um, quirks of Italian football ...

Spurs tried their hardest to #### that up. They were abject. Almost as bad as Inter were in the first leg (but not quite as bad, I think).

Not having Lennon to start (or Bale, of course) hurt v. Inter because, Zanetti aside, beating them is simply a matter of running them to an early death. As Spurs just needed the goal to kill the tie, having no counter with Lennon/Bale played into Inter's hands. I was impressed with Dembele, who would make a very nice Serie A player for his ability to handle challenges, etc. He just had noone to distribute to with speed enough to exploit Inter's highly suspect Chivu at CB look.

So was it the high line, Gallas' inability to keep proper position or Friedel's unwillingness to leave his line that allowed all those Inter players to get behind Spurs' defense?

fre: 394

All three. Friedel isn't suited to that style of play even though I think he's still a solid keeper. The sweeper style stuff Lloris does is not Friedel's strength. AVB was stubborn at Chelsea with the high line, I thought he'd learned his lesson. Maybe not. There are times that playing out of the bunker is the right strategy. This was one of those times. Also I thought Spurs' fullbacks were pretty abject and kept leaving them exposed. As Keith said, I enjoyed it. I wanted Spurs to win but only after playing as many minutes as possible. Its too bad the Chelsea game didn't go to extra time and Arsenal crashed out.

Champions League Draw!!!

PSG vs Barcalona

Bayern vs Juventus

Real Madrid vs Gala

Malaga vs Dortmund

I got Barcalona, Juventus, Real, and Dortmund. That would be a really interesting semi if it comes off. I think Juve is better than they are given credit for and might expose Bayern. We'll see. I'd like to see Dortmund win it, but anyone except Barca would be ok.

Europa draw!

Chelsea vs Kazan

Spurs vs Basel

Fenerbahce vs Lazio

Benfica vs Newcastle

I wanted the Toon to make a run but I don't think they can take out Benfica. I've got Chelsea, Spurs, Lazio, and Benfica.

Is the CL a bracket now? Does this winner of PSG v Barca play the winner of BM v Juve?

As a Dortmund fan, I like this draw unless someone gives me a good reason as to why I shouldn't. I've only seen one of Malaga's games, and it was this past Wednesday's game against Porto; I was not too impressed.

#396--apparently not; I read somewhere this morning there will be a separate semifinal draw for both competitions.

Malaga was discounted already in their qualifier. They are the cinderellas, nothing can stop them.

Malaga was discounted already in their qualifier. They are the cinderellas, nothing can stop them.

Those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it.

Juventus - Dortmund final.