Uefa cup, where art thou?

Is anyone really following the Uefa Cup these days?

I firmly believe Uefa cup should be completely scrapped, or the name of the competition be changed to I Am Not Bovvered Cup or to I Don’t Want To Be Here League.

I am saying this because I used to follow Uefa Cup a lot back in the eighties and nineties, being that my team, Inter Milan, was regularly in the cup by failing to win the Italian Championship or the Italian Cup, but still ending up second, third or fourth in the league.

Let's not forget, in fact, that, from the sixties up to the late nineties, the European Cup (now Champions League) was the cup for the teams who had won the title in their own country the year before, and the Winner’s Cup (now defunct) the cup for the teams who had won the respective national cups.
Uefa was the cup for the top teams that had won nothing the year before but managed to finish close to the top. In other words, Uefa was the competition for the teams who had under-achieved the year before, and so these teams had a point to prove.


The Uefa cup used to be the most difficult cup to win. If the old system was still in use, on this year's tournament of the Uefa Cup we would have teams such as Chelsea , Liverpool , Arsenal, Fiorentina, AC Milan and Juventus. Champions League would still be good with Inter Milan, Manchester United, Bayern Munich and Real Madrid. Winners’ Cup will have Roma, Portsmouth, Valencia and Borussia Dortmund.

But with the new structure of the Champions League replacing the old European Cup, allowing the second, third and fourth team of the major European leagues to take part, the Uefa Cup basically ceased to exist. You either have an under-achieving team from the year before who cannot stop thinking of being stuck in the wrong competition (such as AC Milan this year) or a team who is avoiding relegation (such as Sampdoria or Tottenham).

Not only that, winning the cup now does not generate as much money as reaching one of the Champions League spots! That is an absurdity, because football, and sport in general, have always been about winning trophies... but if the trophy is not good anymore, why spend time and energy for it? No wonder Aston Villa, Manchester City and Tottenham played a weaker side in Uefa Cup last week.
Reaching fourth place in the league or not to be relegated is now more beneficial than winning the Uefa cup. Gone are the days when winning silverware was the biggest prize of all. I remember Fiorentina in the 1989-1990 season, they were struggling to stay in Serie A but they played the Uefa Cup with the best squad they had and almost managed to win.

The new system however, not only devalued the Uefa Cup, but also downgraded the importance of winning the national title. In fact, you could become the champion of Europe only if the year before you had won in your national league. Winning the title meant to be the national champion and playing the year after in the elite of European football. Now, you can play in the Champions League even if you had barely managed to squeeze into fourth place in your league.

How Liverpool, for example, could have been considered Champion of Europe in 2005, if it had not managed to win a national title for fifteen years? It should have played and won the Uefa Cup instead... nothing to be ashmed of, I can assure you.

In the name of equality and for the joy of the Muslim Council of Britain

We are repeatedly told by the media that we live in a multicultural society where diversity is welcome, free speech is guaranteed, and we are all treated equal.

However, last week two news I came across in the paper made me think just the opposite.

The first news is regarding the Domino's Pizza branch in Hall Green, Birmingham, where you cannot order anymore pizzas made of pork or non-halal meat... and why is that you may be wondering? Well, Domino's Pizza has decided to please the fast growing Muslim community in the area by giving them the pizza that even the Prophet Muhammed could not have refused.

Great news indeed for the Muslims but what about all the other non-Muslims who do actually enjoy a Pepperoni pizza? They either need to eat Halal pizza and shut up or go somewhere else... well... somewhere else where the Muslim community is not the majority (for now) I guess.

Apart from pleasing the Muslim community, Domino's Pizza, a Western company, is promoting the cruelest method of animal killing the world has ever witnessed: Halal, in other words, the animal is not stung but its throat is cut while it's still alive and the poor beast is left bleeding until the last drop of blood is gone. The killing is horrible and the animal suffers the pains of hell, but hey, can you get an Animal Rights activist do something about that? Brigitte Bardot has been called a racist for having spoken out, and nobody likes to be called a racist these days.

The second news is that the Dutch MP Geert Wilders has been banned to enter Britain because, so we are told, he is preaching hate against the Muslims. Well... is he? Or was he coming in the UK by an invitation of UKIP MP Gerard Batten to a discussion about his film, called "Fitna", where he claims there is a link between the Koran and the Islamic terrorism? I mean, is it so crazy and racist to believe that the Islamic terrorists, such as the ones on 9/11, are slightly aware of the context of the Koran and possibly misinterpreted it?

Geert Wilders is not a threat to public policy or public security as the Home Office want us to believe, in fact, he is so much a threat to society that in the Netherlands he is under protection 24 hours a day! He has been threatened to death by the Islamists, so don't you think we should listen to what he has to say, or we just prefer him to end up dead like the Dutch film director Theo Van Gogh who was killed by an Islamist because of his film about Islam?

But again, I am told, we live in a multicultural society, where diversity is welcome, free speech is guaranteed, and we are all treated equal.

I am pretty sure the Muslim Council of Britain agrees with that.

Supercrunching me...

I knew she wasn't just making conversation. The crunchy granola, selling organic oils and soaps at the small farmer's market in Beaulieu this weekend, when she asked me: "Where do you come from?" All she want from me was an admission of guilt.

In fact, as soon as I said London, she smirked at me, shaking her head in disapproval, whispering "Oh poor thing, what have you done to deserve that?" and then she went on about the good life in the country and how grim life is in London where nobody care about each other and everybody think about making money and...

It took me a millisecond to understand she wasn't really a country person because real country people do not talk like that, they do not know life in the city and therefore they do not criticize it. She was in fact from East London and had been living in East London for most of her life, but now she was happy living in the countryside looking after her small business and probably a cat.

Now, I don't know you but "organic" people like that crunchy granola are really pissing me off. They are the most intolerant people I have ever met. According to them people living in big cities are morons that have lost contact with nature, do not care about the world and live a life of greed. They try to make you feel guilty about modern life or maybe is just that they can't get round the fact that, unlike them, you don't wear an oversize 1950's jumper and actually know how to comb your hair.

At the farmers market, it looks to me most of the sellers and buyers were eco-friendly crunchy granolas with a point to prove, but I guess that if tomorrow morning me and the other 8 millions of Londoners move to Beaulieu and join them, the eco-friendly people will tell us to bugger off.

By bicycle, preferably.