This time the balls were lukewarm

Atlético had the luck of the draw, Real Madrid a nightmare and Barcelona didn’t come out of the affair in Nyon in particularly good shape either. On this occasion there were no hot and cold balls, just lukewarm ones. Only against Madrid do accusations of tampering with draws fly, the consensus being that when things go their way they must have fixed it somehow. All of this began, as I have mentioned before, during a European Basketball Championship draw, when Raimundo Saporta, then a Fiba executive and later head of Real Madrid Baloncesto, performed the fridge trick: guessing which sides would be the top seeds, he put the balls for Real Madrid and the three other teams – Italian, Czech and Russian – so that they could not meet in the early stages. It was 70 years ago and it was basketball, but…

So Friday’s draw was free of doubt and congratulations to Atleti, who got the better of it. It is a shame that we missed out on a double-header between Atlético and Sevilla, due largely to two missed penalties, but it’s crying over spilt milk. So the Rojiblancos will play Leicester, who do not have Sevilla’s European pedigree but are in good health, at peace and full of beans under their new coach, Craig Shakespeare. As for Juve, they are no joke. They never are. Barça to me are slight favourites, especially if Messi has two good games, something that lately for reasons I can’t put my finger on is becoming less frequent: we saw little of him against PSG and even less in Riazor.

The icing on the cake is the clash between Bayern Munich and Real Madrid. Until the emergence of Barcelona on the European stage, Bayern had always Madrid’s bugbear, and for many they still are. If Madrid could expunge 10 painful chapters from their history, more than half of them would involve Bayern. From a 9-1 humiliation in a friendly to the Germans pulling out of a Trofeo Bernabéu game, to the multiple ugly moments in Europe, such as Juanito’s stamp on Lothar Matthaüs, Klaus Augenthaler and his bull’s horn jibe, “El Loco del Bernabéu” and various chastening defeats. At any rate, this time at least we’ll have the avuncular figure of Carlo Ancelotti here.