Thursday, December 20, 2012

Fly-by post: CL DRAW

Very early this morning (for us Americans), the CL Draw happened. I'll post the full listing below, but we've drawn Arsenal.

My two cents? While I'm confident that we'll prevail over Arsenal, I had really hoped we would draw someone else (Shakhtar Donetsk, Malaga, Porto). Why? Because one of my close friends is a Gunner and we have to co-write a paper about footy this spring together (literally, we're writing the weekend after the second leg), so I'm sad we have to face them (and eliminate them) so soon. And I believe, if I'm correct, we have the second leg at home, which is always a good thing. We're quite difficult to beat at home and I'm sure our guys will be excited about the leg at Emirates, since so many of them really love the English league (but none are Arsenal fans, at least none that I know of...couple of Chelsea, maybe a Man United or two, but no Arsenal that I can think of...I'm sure BSchray will comment with a correction if she knows of any).

Schalke and Dortmund have less-scary draws (though there's no such thing as an easy draw at this stage) than some. I have a feeling most eyes will be in the Real Madrid-Manchester United and AC Milan-Barcelona pairings, as that means that two major clubs will not be making the quarterfinals. (I'll definitely be watching RM-MU and cheering VERY loudly for AC Milan to knock out Barcelona...and not just because one of the members of my dissertation committee is an AC Milan fan).

Here's the full list of pairings and fixtures:
Galatasaray v Schalke Feb. 20 March 12
Celtic v Juventus Feb. 12 March 6
Arsenal v Bayern Munich Feb. 19 March 13
Shakhtar Donetsk v Borussia Dortmund Feb. 13 March 5
AC Milan v Barcelona Feb. 20 March 12
Real Madrid v Manchester United Feb. 13 March 5
Valencia v Paris Saint-Germain Feb. 12 March 6
Porto v Malaga Feb. 19 March 13

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