As the throngs of on-line shoppers spend the morning watching a brownish red bar slowly attempt to reach fulfilment so they can be one of the 30,000 spurs fans in attendance in what could be our final champions league game this season or another glorious night in N17 against Real Madrid I can only wonder whether we’ll experience the same mad rush and frustrating waiting times next season.
Actually I should rephrase that, if you’re used to buying tickets the day they go on-sale through the Spurs ticket office you’ll have experienced the wait before but only when we’re playing Arsenal, Chelsea or United. All other games are easy to get tickets for. This includes Europa league matches because unless the club gets into the latter stages it’s a secondary competition which obviously has less demand.
As the final whistle went in the Sunderland v Liverpool match on Sunday I spoke to a few scousers, all of whom told me Spurs had better watch their back because they were coming for us. My response was I didn’t really care. If we’re not in the champions league again next season I’m happy not to be in Europe at all and thanks to the way the cup competitions have gone this season, finishing 6th would mean exactly that. Their response wasn’t mixed, all of them saying they would happily be in the Europa league again next season because it was another trophy they could win and it showed they were ambitious. That’s a fair assessment of it I guess or you could say reducing the amount of games your club plays can help propel them onto bigger and better things.
Obviously the Europa League is Europes secondary club competition and everyone in it would prefer to be in the champions league but the way UEFA have structured it and diminished it by allowing losing teams from the Champions League to enter at a later stage means it’s a competition that most teams don’t take seriously until they’re into the quarter finals which means they’ve played 10 games (minimum) before anyone really cares. They’re also still 5 games away from winning it which when you consider it’s only 6 games in total to win the oldest club competition, The FA Cup, for a premier league side that’s a lot.
Due to UEFA’s insistence on allowing teams as far down as 4th in their domestic league enter the “Champions” league the Europa League is left with quite a lot of second rate football clubs (I realise the irony in that statement). That’s no disrespect to those clubs or clubs that were big in the 70′s but no longer are. Lets be honest, there’s a reason we’ve played in that competition more than the premier one, but when you compare the teams we’ve played in both competitions it’s clear to see why it’s no longer a competition that gets the heart pumping. In the Champions League so far this season we’ve played Werder Bremen, Inter Milan, AC Milan and soon Real Madrid. In the Europa League or UEFA Cup as it was once known we’ve played the following in recent years: Anorthosis Famagusta, Aalborg, Anderlecht, Wisla Krakow, Udinese and Dinamo Zagreb. Hardly inspiring matches that make you want to part with your cash, not that White Hart Lane wouldn’t be packed as always because that’s what we Spurs fans do but you get my point.
So my question to you is this, if we fail in our attempt to get back into the champions league by finishing in the top 4, or dare I say it lifting the trophy itself, would you prefer us to finish 6th and not be in Europe at all next season or is the Europa League something we should be happy to get into?
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I think the key is to try and win it.
We could have easily won it when ‘Arry came in, and I am a firm believer in the theory that he had no bonus for that cup so played the kids and lost (to the eventual winners).
Like the Milk Cup this year, why are we not trying to win it – I genuinely do not understand. Winning breeds winning – even Winger said that they needed to win the Rumbelows cup to get the winning mentality back in their squad.
Winning a cup is great. The best recent feeling wasn’t beating Inter Milan or AC Milan it was beating Chelsea in the League Cup. Great day.
And that is what concerns me about “the future”.
As it stands the poll here shows 2/3rds of people would rather be “in” the CL than win the UEFA – to me that makes us Woolwich – I want no part of that future.
depends on how you look at the results. Like me people could see the Europa League as such a watered down competition that it’s detrimental to the success of the club in that particular season. Of course winning it would be fantastic but in my opinion that’s actually harder to do than winning the champions league.
If UEFA turned it back into a non seeded knock out competition (even if two legged) it would be such a better thing to be in.
For me we have to be in the Europa League, although I still think we will finish above Manchester City, just.
People mention the step up to CL and playing mid-week games, to maintain this if we don’t make the CL means we have to be in the Europa League. It does offer the chance to play fringe/youth players as not many teams take the Europa League seriously.
This is as a difficult one, for me I’d take CL. We don’t have to do what the Arse have done and just qualify every year and win bugger all else. Why couldn’t we compete and win a domestic cup? Others have done it, surely with the lure of constant CL football the better players will come and we could make finals and win with a good squad. I know that this pretty simplistic but that’s how I roll.