When UEFA finally came to their senses earlier this year & agreed to place the top 8 Euro leagues' champions in pool A in this years' group stage draw, the prospects of the likes of Real Madrid, Atletico Madrid, Manchester United & City, Arsenal & the likes in Pool B & C meant several potential groups of death were likely.
Last night's draw however, rather surprisingly failed to produce any of the complex permutations & with the possible exception of Group D most "big names" should reasonably comfortably survive the group stage into the round of 16.
Last year I tipped 14 of the 16 group stage teams correctly to the round of 16. So here we go for this years':
In Group A, Real Madrid & PSG have too much fire power & class & will go through. Shakhtar lost heavily to Bayern in last year's round of 16. This year Shakhtar has lost Adriano to Milan & Douglas Costa to Bayern & is still homeless due to civil strife in Donetsk. Malmo meanwhile relish the prospects of playing against their homegrown start Ibrahimovic. I do however believe PSG will make life hard for Real Madrid in the battle to top the group.
UCL welcomed back Manchester United after a year of absence by handing Van Gaal's team possibly the easiest draw in Group B. Man Utd should comfortably top the group & Wolfsburg should scrape into 2nd place following selling their Bundesliga player of the season De Bruyne to Manchester City.
Atletico Madrid will comfortably top Group C whilst Benfica & Galatasaray will depend of their home form to finish second & Benfica will come on top. Astana will meanwhile enjoy a chance of a lifetime & have nothing to lose.
Group D is the only potential Group of Death & once again the money rich luck poor Manchester City must be cursing their luck. Last year's finalists Juventus & Europa Cup winners Sevilla will be lurking to spoil the party for Manchester City. To make the matters worse, the 2nd & third placed Bundesliga sides ended up in Pool D & in drawing Moenchengladbach as the fourth team, there is very little space for error in this group. Manchester City have been full of errors in the past few UCL appearances but if they capture De Bruyne, they will be full of confidence.
This is a group which is difficult to predict. Nevertheless, Juventus & Manchester City start as favourites, in particular because the other two teams have no recent UCL experience.
Group E will see Barcelona comfortably qualify whilst Leverkusen will probably beat Roma to the 2nd place, but only just, and again home form will play a crucial role.
Bayern & Arsenal will go through in Group F. Wenger & his team have all the motivation to try to topple Bayern & finish first & gain revenge for elimination at the hands of the Bavarians in 2 of the last 3 seasons. However, they will be facing a determined Bayern side as anything short of a UCL Final appearance will deem Pep Guardiola's 3 years at Bayern a relative failure.
Mourinho's current team Chelsea & his former team Porto will finish 1st & 2nd in Group G.
Group H is probably the most difficult to predict due to relative recent lack of UCL pedigree amongst the 4 sides. Valencia & Zenit start as slight favourites whilst Lyon have not been a force in the French League since the rise of PSG & return of Monaco, Marseille & the likes.
All in all, the most exciting & most watched annual football competition in the world once again promises an exciting season ahead.
Let's hope beINSports, the new broadcast channel in Australia do a good job & don't let the fans down, in particular in light of two major changes compared to previous years:
a) ESPN had 2 channels & therefore showed 2 live matches concurrently on Fox payTV
b) SBS had the right to show one of the ESPN live matches on free to air on both match days on Wednesday and Thursday mornings.
beINSports on the other hand:
a) are yet to announce if they will introduce a second channel or just show one live match on TV & simply show the other matches on their mobile app only
b) More crucially, SBS have lost the rights to Thursday morning matches & will only be showing one live match on Wednesday (with highlights on Thursday nights at 11.30pm on SBS2)
At least on the surface, the above is hardly an ideal situation for the fans.
