Who'll Stop The Rain

So sang Glenn Gregory twenty years ago. It may well have been 'Appy 'Arry's song of choice this afternoon after this afternoons match at Fratton Park was postponed due to torrential rain. As a result of Blackburns' win at Sunderland Arsenal are in 6th place, still two points behind the Tiny Tots in 4th but come Monday the gap ought to be five points as it will be a major surprise if West Brom leave North London with anything other than a severe beating. Bolton travel to the Riverside tomorrow which will be a tough encounter against a resurgent Middlesbrough who are still in the FA Cup and in the Quarter Finals of the UEFA Cup. But it is next weekend's round of matches that could go a long way to deciding the battle for the final Champions League place. Whilst Arsenal entertain Aston Villa at THOF, Tottenham have a tough journey to St James Park whilst Bolton entertain Manchester United. Blackburn host Wigan in what is virtually a derby match with the visitors needing the points in a battle for the last UEFA Cup place. At the end of that weekend, unless all of the teams win which will be a surprise, it may be that Bolton's game advantage is meaningless whilst Blackburn and Tottenham could find themselves overtaken once all games in hand are played.

In some respects the postponement works in Wenger's favour as it has left the team ten days to prepare for the visit of Juventus to THOF on Tuesday night, a similar gap that preceded the victory in the Bernabeu in the last round of the Champions League. It does however appear to preclude Sol Campbell from starting that match as he will still be some way short of match fitness. On the other hand, Reyes has more time to recover and at least there can be no injuries inflicted in the match.

The month of April is shaping up nicely in this little battle as all of the teams have tough games, Arsenal travel to Old Trafford and entertain Tottenham, whilst the Tiny Tots entertain United and Bolton but visit Highbury and Goodison Park. If they come out of that run with anything more than three points, it will be a good return. For Bolton though, April is a complete pig of a month. The visit to Tottenham is the culmination of a run that sees them host Manchester United and Chelsea but have to visit Anfield with Charlton and West Brom their only respite. Blackburn appear to have the least troublesome time of it with their only difficult game being Liverpool at Ewood Park. I suspect Blackburn's problem is that their visits to Charlton and Birmingham will be expected to yield three points apiece and it is that pressure of expectation that could be their undoing.

Sunderland continue to plummet to new depths of ineptitude in the Premier League. Whilst they are not endangering Swindon Town's record of 100 goals conceded, they look set to leave the division with a record low points total. Currently they have amassed a stunning ten points which they may increase to sixteen by the end of the season but if I were a Mackem, I wouldn't bet on it reaching that high. Add to that they have only scored 19 - yes nineteen - goals all season with nine only at the Stadium Of Light. But the real record that they are attacking with such gusto is to become the first team to go an entire season without winning a game at home. They have just three matches left to continue with their attempt with such verve. Their opponents? Fulham, Newcastle and Arsenal. No guesses which is the one they really want to win. Hint: It isn't a team from London...

Elsewhere, congratulations to Reading who will have to forgo the journeys to Southampton and Hillsborough to suffer the hardships of going to the Emirates Stadium and Old Trafford. No doubt they will be hoping for one of the Big Four at home on the opening day of the season, accompanied by the Sky cameras which would give their bank manager a nice welcome to the Premier League.

Today's Tunes are from Echo and The Bunnymen. Last year saw the groups 25th anniversary in the pop business with the usual plethora of re-issues and bonus tracks - go to your local record store to buy "Heaven Up Here" if you do not own the album. A cracking album which brings forth memories of a night during 1984 in my then local with the rest of the drinkers being serenaded by two very drunk Scots lads crooning in what was their best "Mac" impressions - yes there were bloody awful - but to their credit, even in their inebriated state they knew the lyrics to "Over The Wall", "Heaven Up Here" and "Show Of Strength". So in their honour, those three tracks are included from a concert in Rotterdam the year before.

Over The Wall

Heaven Up Here

Show Of Strength

Charm Offensive and Offensive Charm

The Players of MSV Duisberg can step forward and take their bow, at least in one respect this season. Having struggled to avoid the drop from the Bundesliga, they are paying for fans to travel to the match at Wolfsburg on April 1^st. Now the cynical amongst you will have noticed the date of the fixture and be thinking that this is a cruel April Fools joke on the fans, along the lines of transporting them to the ground and then demanding cash to cover the costs of the coaches and tickets having ensured that they will be there to support their team. Anyone who doesn’t pay will presumably be dumped in the middle of nowhere, miles from the nearest train station or autobahn and left for dead. But no, the players are deadly serious. Captain, Georg Koch, believes that The fans have followed us all season and paid out a lot of money in doing so," only to witness the team become embroiled in a relegation battle. There are a number of more highly paid Premier League stars who could take note of this largesse and dig deep into their even deeper pockets to compensate their supporters for the absolute cack that they have served up this season – the players of Birmingham, Aston Villa and Newcastle spring immediately to mind – and even better learn from the humility displayed by Georg. Of course, if Duisberg lose then it will all have been a big Koch up.

As a marked contrast, Chelsea have been charged with "Not Controlling Their Players" again, this time after their tantrums at Craven Cottage following William Gallas' dismissal. Even at the height of their misdemeanours, George Graham's Arsenal side never repeated this trick two away games running. Some might say that this time Chelsea will get a points deduction which would make the title race interesting if say, three points were deducted as if United win their game in hand, they would only be six points behind with a visit to Stamford Bridge being the title decider potentially....But this all goes to prove that despite the words of Messrs Buck and Kenyon, protesting that all they want to do is have a big love - in with everyone, the players are just overpaid, ill-mannered thugs.

When I was a young lad, there used to be an advert for the Milk Marketing Board about a monster stealing kids milk so they'd better drink it before he got to it - the monster was called "Humphrey" and the tagline was "Watch out, watch out, there's a Humphrey about". This is soon to be updated to "Watch out, watch out, there's a Lennart about" as the great big cuddly Wookie that heads up UEFA is itching for a row with the G-14 and standing squarely behind Darth Blatter in his fight with Charleroi. Whilst the cycnical amongst you may say that this is just politicking and that there is absolutely no way that The Stockholm Monster was backing the Boys From Berne just to curry favour for his chosen candidate to replace Boom Boom Blatter next year, I think he is genuinely worried. After all, the UEFA and FIFA competitions will be hugely devalued if the G-14 and chums bugger off and set up in direct competition. After all, let us not forget that if they go, they still own the players contracts and therefore would view any ban as a declaration of war which would mean that the players could not represent their countries, thus wiping most of Western Europe, Africa and South America off of the footballing map. Plus, it would not be difficult to work out which competitions would be televised - hint: it won't be yours Lennart. The only thing that Darth Blatter needs to really be worried about is the shove over the edge of the precipice that he's getting from UEFA. Any stronger and he will plummet into the canyon of obscurity from whence he rose.

The draw for the semi - finals of the FA Cup has pitted Liverpool against Chelsea with the winner probably going into the final as clear favourites, unless of course Middlesbrough get there who have beaten both teams this season. I am sure that Jose and Rafa have their excuses ready for their defeat but the law of averages puts Looneypool as slight favourites to progress as they have not beaten Chelsea in the four meetings between the two sides this season, scoring just once in those matches. It is not often that I want Liverpool to win but on this occasion it is the lesser of two evils.

Today's Tunes are from my favourite band, New Order. Temptation was the first record of theirs that I bought, well got given. A friend decided that my love of all things punk, mod, ska and soul needed updating so gave this as a birthday present which introduced a certain coolness that Crass just couldn't do. As it is, my parents came to loathe this song as it was regularly cranked out on the turntable at loud volumes as you do when you are sixteen. The second is Blue Monday which brought forth the bands debut on Top Of The Pops which was still something to be proud of in those days. In marked contrast to the mimed slick pap of the era, they insisted on playing live - another momentous thing back then - and sounded bloody awful compared to their peers. Yet they were infinitely cooler for doing so. These are taken from their gig in Hyde Park during June 2005.

The Sky's The Limit

The Premier League have reached an agreement with the EU regarding the future selling of Television Rights for their matches. Previously opposed to the clubs consolidating the rights under The Premier League banner, the EU have agreed to allow the status quo to remain with regard to collective bargaining. The main change has come through the bundling of packages and how this will be administered.

For future deals, there will be six packages up for grabs. However, no one broadcaster will be able to bid for more than five of those packages, effectively ending BSkyB's monopoly on live domestic league football. This takes effect from season 2007/08. Both EU and Premier League officials are claiming that this is good for supporters. In some respects one can see where they are coming from, destroying at the swipe of a pen the necessity to purchase one of Sky's Premium packages or visiting the pub to view live matches.

In the last bidding round of the current deal, NTL/Telewest was one such company trying to break Sky's monopoly. On that occasion they formulated a joint bid with ITV although they still failed to win the Gold Package they were attempting to purchase. They were not interested in one of the minor packages so Sky retained full broadcasting rights. With the removal of Sky from one of the bids, the Premier League are now in an awkward position. They will have to spread the matches between the Big 4 - Arsenal, Chelsea, Liverpool and Manchester United - across all six packages to make them attractive for broadcasters to bid for. If they do not, then either Sky will be allowed to make an exceptional bid or these matches go by the wayside and are reduced to Highlights only. And this may not be a bad thing as there is a strong argument for there being too much Live Football when considering all of the domestic cup competitions and Champions League games that are available to watch.

There is a real threat of the complete marginalisation of Live Football. BSkyB will not drop their price to the subscribers to compensate for the reduction in matches that they will show; their argument being that it is one component of a Sports Package being purchased not purely a Football subscription. The nightmare scenario is that Sky win three packages and NTL win the remainder. For the sake of argument I will assume that the Rights for 100 games are up for grabs. This means that Sky Subscribers have the opportunity to view up to 50 games with the other 50 on cable. Given that nobody in their right mind would have Sky and Cable in their house at the same time, the potential television for these matches will be reduced by between one third and one half due to the lower Subscription take up on Cable - I know that our neighbourhood cannot have cable due to covenants placed on the area when the houses were built. Given that I only subscribe to Sky Sports to watch the football, serious consideration will have to be given as to whether or not we continue with this once the Rights are sold. I suspect that NTL will continue to entice one of the Terrestrial Channels into their bid in order to make it more attractive to the Footballing Authorities otherwise they will be faced with viewing figures that nearly plumb the depths that ITV News achieved when they showed a Champions League match involving Newcastle several years ago. The total who watched that game is a UK record as it was officially recorded as zero.

The real winners in this will be the Terrestrial Channels who will once again be able to strike a deal with their Satellite competitors to form joint bids. It is not unrealistic to expect them to deliver an audience of several million in the UK for say, Chelsea v Manchester United, whereas at best Sky will deliver 800,000 whilst NTL will contribute a quarter of that figure. And therein lies the rub of the Sky Monopoly. Whereas they cannot compete in audience terms with the BBC / ITV channels, they can give Channels Four and Five a serious run for their money. Additionally, they have upped the ante with regard to matchday coverage from camera angles through to analysis - Andy Gray has no peer in the UK - to the extent that the improvements on the BBC and ITV are still made to look shambolic. The assumption has to be that Sky will no longer have the incentive to invest in this technology in the future.

But how will any joint ventures between the cable and terrestrial companies work? Given that it is extremely unlikely that two companies will broadcast the same match - there would be little or no incentive to subscribe to cable if it can be watched for free - then the assumption has to be that the majority of "big matches" will need to be shown on terrestrial television unless of course, the package deal will be purely for highlights to be on free to air. Which then begs the question as to how exactly have supporters benefitted?

One other aspect of the EU deal is that the Premier League cartel prevents the Big Four from exploiting their revenue potential. Whilst Italian and Spanish clubs have been able to benefit hugely from selling their Rights individually, English teams cannot do so and thus Revenue shortfalls have to be drawn in from other sources, i.e. Ticket Prices. Whilst a Juve fan can watch their team for less than a tenner, you can barely even get into the car park at an English Non-League ground for that amount. Surely a better deal with the EU would be for the clubs to be allowed to negotiate their own broadcasting deals and have conditions placed upon those deals that allow the clubs to take a maximum of 50% of the Revenue increase (the current deal being the benchmark) each season to operating revenues for use on player purchases, etc., and for the remainder it should be mandatory for clubs to split this revenue increase equally between Capital Investment in the Stadia and reducing Ticket Prices. Now there is a more equitable solution for supporters.

Todays Tunes showcase a Danish band, The Movement, who produce a tuneful mix of agit-prop politics with Beat that is reminiscent of The Redskins but without the polemics and The Jam or The Who as they would sound today. Without being a "retro - mod" band, they have been able to mix their message with the sentiments of Motown, check out A Little Rain. The title track of their current album, Revolutionary Sympathies, is equally tuneful but that does not dilute the message within Their website, The Movement, contains mp3 downloads of several songs for free that need to be checked out, as does their myspace site, The Movement DK

Seven Up

Geoff Horsfield has, in the words of the Walker Brothers, “lost that loving feeling” after West Bromwich Albion refused to take him back early from his loan spell at Sheffield United. To add insult to injury, both Sheffield United and Horsfield have been told by The Baggies that the pre-agreed permanent deal that takes effect once the loan period finishes must go ahead unless The Blades can find another club to buy Horsfield for the same value, which is as yet undisclosed.

In all of the years that I have followed football, I cannot recall coming across a similar situation. There have been instances where a manager has signed a player and then been sacked with his replacement not wanting the player and then flogging them to the first suitor that came along. The murky dealings that surrounded Clive Allen’s move to Arsenal and then onto QPR without playing a competitive match for the club. Rumour control had it that Palace would not sell directly to QPR so Arsenal, who wanted Kenny Sansom, approached Palace with a Swap / Cash deal involving Allen and promptly flogged him onto QPR. The great thing about this piece of conjecture is that it has been doing the rounds for a few years and never yet been denied. But then again, it has never been proved either.

Back to Geoffrey. Football is all about confidence, especially in forwards, and his must be shot to bits after this episode. Whilst he is, probably by his own admission, not going to get signed by the big clubs he is a solid player who would do well for a Championship side that is pushing for promotion as opposed to one that is intent on shooting itself in the foot again. We have all been in situations where we think that a job we have just taken is not right but whereas we have the escape route of Contract work, footballers cannot walk into their local branch of Hays and ask them to find work. Having lambasted Agents recently, this is one occasion where corn will truly be earned if he can find a suitable solution for this.

On the subject of confidence, any win away from home boosts the players more than one at home. To score three on your opponents ground marks a good return but to hit seven is spectacular, especially if it is in a big match that could define your season. Even better is that it sends a message to your rivals that you fear no-one, can score against even the tightest of defences and by no means can you be called “chokers”. So A Cultured Left Foot salutes last night’s seven goal heroes Stenhousemuir and wishes them all the best in their push for promotion from Scottish football’s basement division.

Todays Tunes continue through the timeline of The Peel Sessions, depositing us in 1980 at the height of the Two - Tone dominance of all things musical. This lot though are from a band who never signed to the Coventry based label, instead going with their own Go - Feet brand. Birmingham's The Beat, aka The English Beat to our North Atlantic bretheren, have reformed and are touring again. They always struck me as the "poster boys" of the movement, with Dave Wakelings deep voice and blue eyes making him popular with the lasses. These two tracks are from their September 1980 session, Monkey Murders and New Psychedelic Rockers.

Agents Of Change

FIFA have on their website, http://www.fifa.com/, published their Report, “Task Force: For The Good Of The Game” which will be ratified at their next World Congress having received Darth Blatters’ approval earlier this week. The document is a broad-brush summary of their aims and methodology for achieving those aims, covering Politics, Finance and

One of the sections deals with Agents and how to improve the transparency of any transactions that they are involved in, alongside how to generally improve the behaviour of Agents ensuring that certain professional standards are met. One proposal is a cycle of Continuing Professional Development, much like those employed by Lawyers and Accountants. FIFA are so bold as to suggest that the Agents may want to consider sitting exams “every few years” to ensure their competence is maintained. The Agents that is, as opposed to FIFA who are universally derided as incompetent.

A Cultured Left Foot has been handed a copy of the next exams, which cost only a years supply of assorted brown paper bags and envelopes, and reproduces a sample of the questions below:

1. Your client, Club A, asks you to find a suitable buyer for Player X. They specify the fee you should quote. Do you:

a. Ask for the price requested and make no further demands for fees, etc.
b. Work your socks off to achieve a deal everyone is happy with
c. Offer to negotiate a 20% cash discount, deposits to be made into offshore bank...

2. What colour are the highest denomination of notes of your country of residence:

a. Brown
b. Purple
c. Green
d. Don’t know. Have never seen through the brown paper bag.

3. Which is the odd one out:

a. Agent
b. Honesty
c. Bung

4. Player A has another Agent representing him. You think you can make a quick buck, sorry, better job of maximising his commercial revenues. How do you approach the player to ensure he signs your contract:

a. Provide a strong commercial case for him appointing you
b. Offer to undercut his current Agents fees
c. Tell him that unless he signs your contract, the photos of him and the 15 year old Thai ladyboy will find their way to the News Of The World Sports’ Desk.

Current Transfer Rumours from THOF include Pires off to Rangers – He’s not according to his agent…Henry off to Internazionale for £20m in the summer being replaced by Fernando Torres for £16m…Joey Barton signing for £12m…The world’s tallest footballer, Nicola Zigic for £7m, roughly a million quid per foot…Ashley Cole to Madrid with either Beckham, Robinho or Baptista going in the opposite direction…Theo Walcott will join Rangers on a season long deal…Yobo or Ledley King will move to THOF this summer, replacing Sol Campbell…Mikeal Landrau will sign as the long term replacement for Jens Lehmann…Arsenal set to piss Barca off by signing their youth international Fran Merida for peanuts. All of these and more complete bollocks can be found at Football Rumours.

Todays Tunes take in two tracks by The Skids, including in their ranks the late, lamented Stuart Adamson and the preposterously prententious Richard Jobson. Personally, I prefer The Armoury Show stuff to the latter Skids efforts but the recently remastered Days In Europa is still a classic album. Kicking off with The Saints Are Coming there follows a cover of Bowie's All The Young Dudes made famous by Mott The Hoople.

FIFA 0, Bosman 2 (Replay possible)

Just like a punch drunk prizefighter, the G-14 clubs are reeling around the football ring stumbling from one fight to another. Having attempted a set-to with UEFA over their Vision Europe project, they then proceeded to try another one with the same organisation over a re-vamp of the Champions League, wanting two more games per team in each tournament. This is, of course, a set of G-14 clubs who are completely unrelated to the bunch of fly-by-nights who wanted a reduction in the fixture list not so long ago.

However, today they stumbled straight into a fight that they have long been spoiling for. The thorny issue of compensation for players called up for international duty has been vexing the clubs for the last few seasons, with Dastardly Darth Blatter swatting them away on the basis that (a) it was not an issue for FIFA to get involved with, (b) the National Associations pump their profits into all levels of the game using funds provided by the FIFA World Cup and (c) he really just could not be arsed to sit down and work out a compromise with the clubs. Now he has no choice as European Giants Charleroi are taking the Burghers of Berne to court in Belgium over an injury suffered by Adbelmajid Oulmers whilst on International duty with Morocco. Charleroi claim that his injury in November 2004 effectively was the reason why the Belgian title did not staying in their trophy cabinet for the next twelve months. Leaving aside the obvious subjectivity of their results if he had played the remaining six months of the season, there is the small question as to whether or not they would have been capable of breaking the monopoly enjoyed by Anderlecht and Club Brugge. Personally I doubt it.

They do have a valid point in terms of the claim for compensation. It seems ludicrous that a business can be ordered (not politely asked; ordered) to release its main assets in order that they are used by another business to fulfill its commitments that have been placed on it by a third business, without any recompense for use or damage to this asset. Put bluntly, any real business that agreed to that series of transactions would quickly go to the wall. The problem that clubs face in getting FIFA's agreement to the compensation is the disparity of wealth between the different member states which is one of the reasons why FIFA is the chosen defendant rather than the Moroccan FA. Looking at the England squad, a conservative estimate is that the average weekly wage will be in the neighbourhood of £60k per week - a very respectable neighbourhood in which to reside, I am sure you will agree. Over the course of the World Cup, the players will be unavailable to their clubs for a period of six to eight weeks. This is a cost of approximately £11.5m in monies paid for an asset that cannot be used. Now for the cash rich Western Europeans, this is not particularly a problem but for the cash strapped African and Asian FA's this is more than their revenues in one season.

Which leads to serious questions about the leadership being shown by Blatter. Or perhaps arrogance would be a better description. He has clearly only thought that the clubs are flexing their muscle and how dare they intrude on his personal fiefdom. Any sane thinking person would have thought to head this off before another bloody nose is dealt to football by the European Court of Justice. If this action in Belgium is defended successfully, there will be precious little respite before a case is brought before the French courts by Olympique Lyonnais in similar circumstances, i.e. player injured on International duty - not the Championship. It will only take one of these cases to go to the ECJ and the FIFA House of Sand will start to crumble. Once this does, the G-14 clubs will not be the only sharks in the water circling the FIFA carcass. The Great White UEFA is a particularly lethal predator although this beast prefers death by a thousand cuts rather then one fell swoop.

Todays Tunes are from Siouxsie and the Banshees, two singles from the earlier part of their career as punk-goths. First up is Israel, rapidly followed by Spellbound

The Power Of Love

The Guardian ran a story on Saturday about an internal document that had come into their possession from the G-14 group of European clubs, called G-14 Vision Europe. It was claimed that this was the manifesto for the clubs to take over running Europe, rendering UEFA impotent which when allied with the Professional Game Board attempting to gain more of influence and power at The Football Association, proved that the rich clubs want to rule the footballing world. At least that is what the theory was anyway. Included within the article were the sage words of one William Gaillard, you may recall that he was the UEFA suit who asked how the organisation was supposed to police football clubs – here is your answer Billy Boy, they do not want you to. Using emotive and ill chosen words like “apartheid”, he posited the theory that the clubs wanted to enforce an American model without relegation and promotion rather than the supposed meritocracy created by the rest of the world. And in that, UEFA is no doubt correct. There is little choice for these clubs to create protectionist policies as otherwise what is the point in having a lobby group. They have their revenue streams, and as Manchester United are finding out, when the revenues fall, belts get tightened. Looking at the Premiership, it is not difficult to see the impact on regularly playing in Europe’s premier club competition has. Newcastle United and maybe Tottenham are the only clubs that can match the wealth of Arsenal, Manchester United, Liverpool and Chelsea, a pattern replicated throughout the other major leagues in Europe.

This is the problem that UEFA have themselves created on many levels but primarily on two fronts. Firstly, the creation of The Champions League encouraged teams to maximise revenues by the inclusion of a Group stage, or for a number of years, two Group stages. The impact of this was to appease the clubs with guaranteed increased revenue generation through more matches. It also, with few exceptions, created a climate where the larger teams could qualify for more matches with more chances to rectify one bad result. That Porto and Liverpool have won the last two Champions League tournaments as unfancied teams matters not one jot. They are members of the G-14.

The second area of problems was created when UEFA launched a naval gazing exercise, entitled “Vision Europe”. Now rather coincidentally, the G-14 document that The Guardian refers to is also entitled “Vision Europe”. Can it also be a coincidence that the UEFA exercise closed its doors to submissions last week? Very possibly the two are related – a political exercise that received a political answer, i.e. the professional game ought to have more say in running the game. The G-14 were hardly likely to send in a submission to an incompetently run organisation saying that UEFA were doing a fine and dandy job running the game and that they wanted to leave things as they are when the two of them have a naturally antagonistic relationship, descending to playground levels with UEFA refusing to recognise the existence of the G-14 but creating a Professional Clubs Forum several years after the Lobby Group existed.

This conflict has been on the football horizon for a number of years. The starting point to it all was about fifteen years ago when an Italian media company first floated the idea of a European League that they would back. This threat was taken very seriously by UEFA who headed off the problem by revamping their club competitions over a five-year period. Firstly they created a Group Phase in the European Cup, essentially this ensured that those clubs who qualified for this phase were guaranteed a minimum of ten matches in the competition. This appeased the revenue hungry clubs as they had previously only been guaranteed two matches under the old round robin system. The next change was the catalyst for the current spat. By introducing another Group phase, UEFA suddenly upped the revenue ante. They also did not have runners – up which has mushroomed into four teams for such luminaries as England, Italy and Spain. In order to accommodate this, the Cup Winners Cup was shelved and the UEFA Cup took up the slack. Each of these step changes has had one major benefit. A substantial increase in money for the Champions League clubs meant that UEFA had headed off the problem at the pass but was still storing more problems for the future. Another tinkering session eliminated one of the Group phases as the major teams were suddenly finding that upstarts like Deportivo La Coruna and Bayer Leverkusen were putting their noses out of joint and doing well, even knocking the big teams out. The temerity of it all! So the second round became round robin again. Which has not entirely worked as it was planned to. Real Madrid have not to make any impact on the competition since this was reintroduced, the Quarter Finals at best. A significant number of the G14 do not threaten to win the tournament at all. Manchester United were eliminated this season at the Group phase, their expectation is Quarter Finals every season although why this is the case I know not as since the re-introduction of the second round, they have not made it past there.

The clubs are however under the misapprehension that everyone wants to see the G14 play each other on a regular basis. And to some extent we do but not in the contrived manner that they wish to impose. The beauty of Arsenal v Real Madrid from many people’s perspective was that this was the first time that the two sides had met in competitive competition. The only other time had been a friendly in 1962. This was an exciting draw for Arsenal fans. Juventus is anticipated because it is firstly a return to Highbury for Patrick Vieira and secondly a Quarter Final with the club having a decent chance at progressing to the Semi Finals for the first time in their history.

There is however, one compromise where the two organisations, UEFA and G14, could co-exist peacefully; the creation of a European League to run concurrently with Domestic Competitions as a partial replacement for the Champions League. Why not call it “The Champions League”? Consisting of fourteen teams, which would be constructed as follows: English, Italian, Spanish and German champions with ten qualifiers, who come through by winning a group in a phase of mini leagues as is in the current Champions League. These would comprise the current qualifiers to that competition. Once the first group of fourteen teams were sorted, a second division would be created through the runners – up in the mini league qualifiers and four best qualifiers. The remaining teams would then go into the UEFA Cup, with the Cup Winners Cup being resurrected for domestic FA and League Cup winners. In order to fit the extra games in, the top divisions in domestic football would also consist of a maximum of sixteen teams. Any team in the new Champions League would be barred from entering domestic League Cup competitions. For future seasons, the domestic qualification remains the same, i.e. the top four in the Premiership, of whom three must qualify to be in the competition.

With that format, the number of games remains roughly the same so no complaints about loss of revenue or tired players. Domestic football is satisfied as there is still due deference to the Leagues and Cup with more teams having the chance to actually win a domestic cup competition and the Premiership becoming more competitive.

Todays Tunes continue the Peel Sessions week, these from excellent punk band The Ruts whose career was curtailed through the untimely death of their vocalist Malcom Owen. What made the band stand out for me was the tuneful menace that they could bring to their songs as opposed to just being a three chord thrash. They were equally at home with the ubiqitous reggae tinged punk that was popular, Jah War being their prime example, but were probably the only band to be the peers of The Clash in this particular field. These two tunes are SUS and Secret Soldiers.

As a brucie - bonus, one more track is included from the relatively shortlived Ruts DC, their post - Owen incarnation. Rather like Liverpool after young Mickey left, they were OK, capable of flashes of brilliance but on the whole rather workmanlike. This track is Different View.

One final fact, posting the Ruts DC track means that 50 different bands have now been showcased here, not a bad tally in 46 days of posting.

Enjoy.