By Bulldog Drummond
As one might expect with anything run by Uefa, the 36-team Champions league has proven to be pretty farcical with one team winning all their games and three teams losing all their games. We started to see who was not going anywhere a couple of rounds back, so clubs are left playing pointless games in front of diminishing crowds.
The rule is that the clubs in the top eight go onto the round of 16. The next 16 then play a home and away knock out and all the clubs below below 24th leave the competition and don’t go into any other international competition having been thoroughly humiliated..
Of course there are two games left for each club so it is possible for clubs all the way down to 26th in the league to progress by winning their last two games while teams at the top don’t, but as we all know it doesn’t work like that.
We can of course have a little snigger about the position of Real Madrid lurking in 20th, Manchester City in 22nd, and PSG in 25th, but really, it all seems a bit silly, and certainly the way they used to do things made much more sense. But in case you really need to know her is the table top plus some extracts below…
| P | W | D | L | F | A | GD | PTS | ||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Liverpool | 6 | 6 | 0 | 0 | 13 | 1 | 12 | 18 |
| 2 | Barcelona | 6 | 5 | 0 | 1 | 21 | 7 | 14 | 15 |
| 3 | Arsenal | 6 | 4 | 1 | 1 | 11 | 2 | 9 | 13 |
| 4 | Leverkusen | 6 | 4 | 1 | 1 | 12 | 5 | 7 | 13 |
| 5 | Aston Villa | 6 | 4 | 1 | 1 | 9 | 3 | 6 | 13 |
| 20 | Real Mad | 6 | 3 | 0 | 3 | 12 | 11 | 1 | 9 |
| 21 | Celtic | 6 | 2 | 3 | 1 | 10 | 10 | 0 | 9 |
| 22 | ManCy | 6 | 2 | 2 | 2 | 13 | 9 | 4 | 8 |
| 34 | RB Leipzig | 6 | 0 | 0 | 6 | 6 | 13 | -7 | 0 |
| 35 | Slovan Bra | 6 | 0 | 0 | 6 | 5 | 21 | -16 | 0 |
| 36 | Young Boy | 6 | 0 | 0 | 6 | 3 | 22 | -19 | 0 |
Dinamo Zagreb whom we play on Wednesday are 24th having won two, drawn two and lost two, and with a goal difference of -5, compared with Arsenal’s of +9. They had a goalless draw with Celtic, a 0-3 home defeat to Dortmund, a 4-1 away win against Slovan Bratislava, and a 0-2 away win against Salzburg.
Last time I looked there were still plenty of tickets available – it is classified as a B price game, appears on the season ticket, and I think a fair number of people with season tickets are not going.
Arsenal’s final game in the group is away to Girona who are currently 30th, with one win and five defeats. The City Group own Girona, so beating them should be a rather pleasant matter if that is allowed to happen by the referee.
So the English clubs are currently 1st, 3rd, 5th and 22nd – the club letting the English league down is of course Manchester City.
And now here’s a little snippet for you: “Dinamo Zagreb has never won away from home against an English side in the European Cup or the Champions League with all four of those previous attempts being by Dinamo Zagreb. So I suspect by and large we know what we will be expecting. Anything other than an Arsenal win will be an upset.
Interestingly last time I had a look there were still tickets available. And of course, the big problem is the injuries of which Arsenal have so many they can hardly be counted. So the question now becomes can Arsenal’s reserves beat Dinamo Zagreb.
But now with all the other websites offering “All you need to know” Untold now proudly offers all you don’t need to know.
And what you don’t need to know is that the full name of the club is “Građanski nogometni klub Dinamo Zagreb” which may be translated into London English as Dinamo Zagreb Citizens’ Football Club.
Now what you really do need to know is about the form of the club and with this in mind I can tell you that they have won the league in 2006, 2007,2008. 2009, 2010, 2011, 2012, 2013, 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021, 2022, 2023 and 2024.
That is roughly around 19 titles in a row (I got bored with the counting) and this is what happens when one team is allowed to become bigger than everything else. I wonder what the odds are on them winning the title next season.
