European Showdown in England

Juventus 0 - Liverpool 0

So it came to pass that one European Champions League semifinal will be played between two EPL teams. Chelsea vs Liverpool, in Stamford Bridge for the first leg, in 2 weeks' time.

What an over-achieving performance by Liverpool last night. I did not expect their defence to hold out so well against the joint Serie A leader, especially in Italy. I saw the match only in bits and pieces, but saw enough to be pretty impressed by the comparative lack of panic on Liverpool's part. Juve rather surprised me in their lack of penetration; it seems Benitez's 5-man midfield managed to choke their flow through the centre of the pitch.

This is not a great Liverpool team but this was a great achievement. They rose above their own limitations to beat a team that is, objectively speaking, superior in skill and organisation. That they did it with all their injury problems is doubly admirable.

There will be those who will question the quality of Europe's premier club competition, when a team can get so far despite being more utilitarian than it is scintillating. This is fair enough. There does seem to be something not quite right about having Liverpool and PSV in the semifinals, when Real Madrid and Barca did not even make the quarterfinals. If you had to choose two clubs from England to be semifinalists, you might have chosen Man Utd and Arsenal, for their entertainment value and quality of players, or Chelsea for their consistency. Liverpool would certainly not be on most people's lists. That said, I think Liverpool has played patches of scintillating football to get to the semifinals. This is not a great team by any means, but it is a team capable of great moments, which they have managed to produce at the right times. For that, I think their place in the semifinals is just as well deserved as Chelsea's.

(On a different note, I saw the post match interview with Sammi Hyppia and Jamie Carragher. Could Carragher speak any more quickly and in any longer sentences? He was the token Brit SkySports chose to interview and yet it was far easier to comprehend Hyppia, the Finn who speaks English as a second (or maybe 3rd or 4th) language. It was actually rather remarkable! Later on, when they interviewed Benitez, his speech pattern was by far the easiest to understand, although his grasp of English is definitely the weakest of the three. Very strange phenomenon.)