By Camilla Mancini
One of the major soccer championships is the UEFA Champions League and as always this season the knockout stage it’s full of first-rate clubs. The draw for the Round of 16 schedules started early on Friday December 16th and it was covered by many reporters from all around Europe. It started with a recap of the teams that belong to the group of winners and to the runners-up, as well as a brief summary about how the draw works. So the 8 clubs from the winners group were seeded, while the runners-up weren’t; each squad is settled to play against one from the other group and that’s where the draw comes in.
The teams from the winners group were FC Bayern München, FC Internazionale Milano, SL Benfica, Real Madrid CF, Chelsea FC, Arsenal FC, APOEL FC and the Cup defender, FC Barcelona. On the other side were SSC Napoli, PFC CSKA Moskva, FC Basel 1893, Olympique Lyonnais, Bayer 04 Leverkusen, Olympique de Marseille, FC Zenit St Petersburg and AC Milan. None can play with a club from the same group or the same association, meaning that some could cut options off before the draw. Nevertheless all the clubs are some of the best from their own leagues, so however the draw was going to fix the eight couples, all of the encounters were going to be excellent challenges.
Anyway, this is how the draw went: the first ones to be paired and also chosen to open the Round of 16 on February 14th were the French Lyon and APOEL that has become the first Cypriot squad to reach the knockout phase in history. It continued fixing up Chelsea with Napoli, which will play each other for the first time in this UEFA competition on February 21st. The next one was also an English-Italian pair, Arsenal vs. Milan, which have been settled to meet on the second day of matches at San Siro and on March 6th at Emirates Stadium. The Bavarians will visit Manchester United’s executioner, Basel, during Week 2 of the 1st leg, while their less fortunate compatriots from Leverkusen will have to confront the intimidating Barça that is in the hunt for its second in-a-row title, to complete the quintet. The remaining four were the two Russians, the only Portuguese club and Barça’s biggest rival from La Liga. By then those last clubs were just hoping no to be set with Real Madrid for the Last 16’s fixtures. In the end CSKA was drawn to play the Spaniards on February 21st and March 14th. This means that the last two are Benfica and Zenit St. Pertersburg, which is one of the 3 debutants.
We are about a month and a half away from the beginning of the knockout phase and the suspense is intense around all the squads and their fans. We can find everywhere comments about the fixtures, the clubs, the players and predictions about who are going to quarterfinals and who aren’t. What I can assure you is that there are a couple of uneven pairs, the most obvious is the new Club World Cup Champions against Leverkusen. And I’m not saying that the German group doesn’t have it in it, but that they will have to make a huge effort to stop the Curés’ ferocity; even more since they haven’t been at their best as we’ve seen in the Bundesliga.
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