By the time you read this, the identity of the four Champions League semi-finalists will have been decided, and the joust between Man United and Chelsea will have gone a long way towards settling the English Premier League. A week really is a long time in soccer. I won’t offer up any hostages to fortune by venturing any predictions as to how it all turned out, but I must say I thought the quarter-final first legs made for a spectacularly enjoyable couple of nights’ entertainment. The Champions League is an incredibly dreary affair in its early stages (a fact UEFA appear to have belatedly cottoned onto) but when it really gets going in the spring, it truly is a thing of wonder.

Obviously, the week’s pleasures reached their zenith at the moment when Ivica Olic plunged a knife into Manchester United’s heart in stoppage time in Munich, a delightful karmic payback for the unspeakable events of May 1999, which have scarred me for life. United never really recovered from the perfect start provided by Wayne Rooney’s second-minute goal, and settled down to one of those curiously inert displays which they’re prone to produce in the European arena every now and then.
United are at their least effective when (presumably at Fergie’s instigation) they take it into their heads to adopt a posture of sophisticated negativity: it has cost them time and again in the Champions League, hence the return of only two European Cups during fifteen years of untrammelled domestic superiority. When I say ‘only’ two European Cups, I don’t mean to downplay the enormity of either achievement, merely to point out that they could and should have won a hell of a lot more.
Excessive, unwarranted caution against the likes of Milan and Munich has frequently been their downfall. This sort of chess-match stuff doesn’t suit them at all, and tends to obscure their biggest strength: a capacity for high-energy, super-aggressive attacking potency.
United are invariably at their best when flinging the kitchen sink at opponents in a hell-for-leather frenzy – their phenomenal propensity to turn defeats or draws into wins in the dying minutes is the biggest testimony to this. We can sneer all we like at the generous portions of injury-time they tend to be awarded by terrified referees, but the point is that they usually make it count. It was strange to see them on the receiving end in Munich, and though I suspect they’ll have recovered the situation by the time you read this, the suspicion remains that they will once again fall short of winning the thing.
Arsenal’s recovery against Barcelona was also pretty stirring stuff, though the mind boggled as to how on earth the Gunners survived the firestorm, a majestic Barca having taken sole ownership of the ball and generally run rings, squares and triangles around Arsene Wenger’s crew.
Both teams are an aesthetically appealing mixture of creative brilliance and defensive fragility, though the latter is far more pronounced in Arsenal’s case than Barca’s (for all the Catalans’ visionary passing and sublime possession football, the fact is that they also work like dogs when they don’t have the ball).
Barca’s undeniably mouth-watering football has, perhaps understandably, become the repository of reams and reams of gushing purple prose that frequently verges on the excruciating. The ridiculously sycophantic press coverage they tend to attract, as well as the self-mythologising Munster-esque ‘More Than A Club’ bullshit, is indeed irritating, but when they play football the way they can… well, comparisons to Brazil 1970 are in no way absurd.
This is undoubtedly one of the best teams you’ll ever see, and we should savour every moment while we can (I’ve really done it now: if Arsenal are somehow still alive on the Thursday morning you read this, Arsene Wenger will know who to thank).
Elsewhere, the much-overlooked FC Internazionale v CSKA Moscow encounter was a hugely compelling battle of wits, a sort of cerebral chess-match between Messrs Mourinho and Slutsky, with occasional flashes of brilliance from Eto’o, Sneijder, Maicon and Milito largely neutralised by the remarkably well-organised Russkies, who as a nation look likely to form the biggest impediment to Ireland’s hopes of reaching Euro 2012.
I didn’t see any of Lyon-Bordeaux, though I’ve seen enough of Lyon’s goalkeeper Hugo Lloris to conclude that he’s possibly the best keeper in the known universe right now (Iker Casillas and, yes, Shay Given are his only peers).
I’ll return to dissect the competition in further detail when we know who the semi-finalists are. In the interim, I trust you will find the time to luxuriate in the splendour of the Aintree Grand National and the U.S. Masters at Augusta, two of the most mesmerising visual spectacles on God’s green earth. Inshallah.