England - Premier League

Rafa and Mourinho out, Sir Alex and Wenger in

We have reached a stage where Champions League and UEFA Cup go along different paths. This week we will see the matches of the penultimate UEFA Cup group stage round, which is good news, at least for us. Less matches means not only less work but also better focus so we hope for better results. You can see our predictions for UEFA Cup here.

In the meantime, except for doing all of our weekend work, we discussed the quality of Spanish and English football. Text published on Soccerpie caused some divisions in our redaction, but we definitely agreed that Mourinho and Benitez are to blame for the results in Premier League while Sir Alex and Wenger still defend the honour of attractive football. Of course, this doesn’t mean that tonight’s match between Liverpool and West Ham will be boring, though we did opt for a low-scoring game.

Perhaps the calculations with tactics is the only way to survive in more competitions at the same time. Certain bookies started with the odds on strongest clubs in the Premier League. So Victor Chandler offered the odds of 5.00 on all three English clubs to win. The reason is tight schedule so even the strongest ones have troubles with continuity.

Aside from UEFA Cup, we will also see Carling Cup matches by the middle of the week. Previews will be on our website already tomorrow, after which we will turn to next weekend. We are in for several big derbies. Barcelona and Valencia meet in Primera, as well as Real and Sevilla, Lazio will host Inter in Serie A, while the leading English clubs will also have some difficult tasks.