Carve up or poor shooting?

Read the Daily Mirror this morning and see their take of the Arsenal/Porto match last night.

Both sides needed a draw, and fantastically if you’re both Portuguese and an Arsenal supporter – as one of my mates is – the game worked out perfectly.

Arsenal barely managed anything you might called a shot, but in fairness Porto hit the woodwork a couple of times.

The Mirror is in no doubt in its opinion of whether it was a carve up or poor shooting.

Anyway who cares because as I said yesterday I’m one of those people – and there’s probably not many of them around – who want all British clubs to get through to the next round in Europe.

And as far as the Champions League goes with five clubs out of the last 16, I’d like to see them all through to the last eight, but that’s not likely to happen.

Chances are, as well, Celtic will get one of the English clubs – they can’t draw Man United as they were in the same group, so I reckon it’s going to be either Barcelona or Liverpool.

If it is (as we won’t find out until Friday of next week) I think they’d lose to Barca and might beat Liverpool.

Champions League nights have become great TV viewing thanks to the combination of Sky and ITV showing all the games simultaneously so you can flick between games all the time, as I do.

But Tuesday night I found myself absorbed and stuck to the Barca/Werder Bremen game which was, for me, what great European Cup football should be all about.

The first half Barca played like European champions, helped by a brilliant Ronaldinho freekick. In the second half it was superb end-to-end football as Werder did their best to come back into the game, and Barca seemed unable to finish the Germans off.

It was an awesome game, and a sharp contrast to Chelsea’s efficient 2-0 demolition of Levski Sofia.

As someone said to be after the Chelsea - £21m, not bad for one goal – referring to Wright Phillips, and if you do the sums, Shevcenko’s goals have cost about £10m each so far.

Oh well, if you’ve got the money, flaunt it.

Sadly as we get to the knock out games I’ll think we’ll see more of the Chelsea style and less of the Barca way, but being a lover of real football, I hope the beauty triumphs over the beast.

Lawrence Gosling is group editorial director at Incisive Media (publisher of IFAonline).

The views expressed are those of the author and not those of the company he represents.