Saturday, May 31, 2008

Recap of footballing season

This blog has been revived once again,,hopefully it'll stay long enough for our fans to enjoy after missing out on our recent news..so footballing season in Europe has just ended lets see the conclusion of the winners and losers in the respective leagues..

EPL:Manchester United
English FA: Portsmouth
Carling : Tottenham Hotspurs
La Liga : Real Madrid
King's Cup : Valencia
Seria A : Inter
Italian Cup : Roma
Ligue 1 : Lyon
French L Cup: PSG
Bundesliga: Bayern Munich
German L Cup: Bayern Munich
SPL: Celtic
Scot Cup: Rangers
UEFA Cup : Zenit St Petersburg
UEFA UCL: Manchester United

Those are just few list of winners in certain league..there are whole lot more if we were to list them all but we Armadans have not enough time for that cause we need to kick some balls so we gotto summarise the whole European season thus far..

The English Premier League,..so called the most exciting league in the world..it might be..Arsenal lead for most of the season and suddenly the played few of their worst game for Man Utd to take the top of the table,..both teams player beautiful football all season long but Arsenal have themselves to blame after playing such great game only to end up 3rd in the league finish behind Chelsea which came up with a late surge with the surprise manager Avram. Luck you may call it but Man Utd are worthy winners,they score the most and conceded the least in the league and luck may play some part in the title race but to win the title you need some luck to win it, just like the other leagues in the world. The supporters of the teams that finished as runners up can also complain by saying that the ref is biased that lil rubbish has been circulating since Mourinho was in charge at Chelsea and when his team struggled against Barcelona back then in the UCL. The Carling cup and FA cup sprung a surprise when not even the big four was the winner this season..Chelsea again who claimed that they should have won something are still nothing as the were beaten by Spurs in the Carling cup final. They had themselves to screw..FA cup was the real big surprise as the big four came tumbling down one by one and Portsmouth as the sole rep in the semi finals came out as eventual winners after eliminating Manu by some lady luck however kudos to these 2 teams which have done pretty well

In Spain, Real's title was more or less some luck..before the start of the season Schuster's side struggled at all those pre-season friendly only to perform well in the league and did not fare well in the domestic competitions and the UCL. Valencia's board should knock themselves in the head by sacking their then manager Quique Flores and taking Koeman as the new boss. Koeman did nothing good but almost pulling the club into relegation and survived late in the season not forgetting they finished bottom in their UCL group stage and thus did not even enter the UEFA Cup. Canizares and Albelda was omitted from the squad when both of them are very influential players for the team but they were lucky to get the consolation by winning the King's Cup. Barcelona the favourites to win the La Liga and UCL fail to live up to expectation and end the season trophy-less and the worst part is their boss Rijkaard got the boot. Stars like Henry joined the team only to have a very disappointing season in Spain lead to the club's failure and the star playmaker Ronaldinho hard partying style was also condemned by the press as part of the failure too..However the club could do well next season if the rebuliding of the club is done at perfection by the new boss.

Italy Inter seems like the runaway winner again earlier in the season but the title race was not over till the very end of the season when their star striker Ibrahimovic scores a brace to lead them to their 3rd straight scudetto leaving Roma fans in despair. Week later Roma got their revenge by beating Inter to win the Italian cup. Juventus bounce back from their match fixing scandal and finshed 3rd in the league and they are almost certain in the UCL next season should they win their 3rd round qualifying. AC Milan last season's UCL winner..wow..was rather disappointing as they finished 5th and hey will miss out on the UCL for the first time in many years.

The other leagues saw Munich and Lyon as runaway winners in their league, Rangers of Scotland almost won the title but self destruct and let Celtic win their 3rd straight title, however Rangers won a double this season and they go all the way to the UEFA Cup Finals which they lost to Zenit of Russia.

The UCL was the biggest prize of all in club football dominated by English clubs this season with 3/4 in the last four. Therefore there is no real surprise that it was an all English final for the first time in the tournament history. The match up of the final was evenly balance with both Manu and Chelsea are quite evenly match as both teams are unbeaten. Manu played the best game on the first half but Chelsea got lucky with the equaliser and controlled the game for most of the time until the penalties which they lost by some lady luck. However think back when Chelsea bought Shevchenko from Milan their objective was to increase their chances in winning the UCL but we know what he did in Chelsea besides being a bench warmer but when Chelsea got their first UCL final they did not even want to put him in to take the penalties and opted for Anelka instead which he eventually missed. As arrogant it may sound in Mourinho in saying Avram is a loser it could be true because of the mistake in strategy, going into to cup finals and not winning anything is truly indeed nothing but failure.

So thats bout it for this season's club football..EURO 08 is next.. Go Oranje..!