This is the table showing the standings as we prepare to play the final match of the league phase of the Champions League tonight. Which is so important to me that I’m going out for dinner. Not my idea, but faced with ‘free dinner vs despair’, it was a hard choice.

What’s interesting is that in the top 11 places there are 6 English teams. Once again showing, in glaringly unambiguous statistical certainty, that the other European leagues are shit. They’re a sham. Its all a bit ‘Scotland’. 2 amazing, fantastic and rich clubs, add in 1 or 2, but NO MORE, average ‘also-rans’ and fill the remainder with the hopeless and the dire.

The UEFA Cup final last year was contested by the two English teams who came immediately above the relegation zone. So you can be a crappy English team and still be better than 90% of the Europeans.

Ok, seeing Arsenal top of yet another table doesn’t do much for me. I should give them some credit for that. But simply can’t. Interestingly, during their most successful season, so far, in a decade, at the first sniff of a loss, last Sunday, their lovely fans immediately ‘turned’ and started booing their team.

You need your team to play much more consistent dross and lose far more games really badly before you have the right to boo. You have to be like Spurs. Then you have the right to hit the ‘sacked in the morning’ tape. Don’t those miserable, entitled gooners realise that booing your own team is not really the encouragement they’re going to need to win matches?

With Spurs, I just despair. To say that this league table flatters my team is such a vast understatement that I would question its validity in normal circumstances. But it is what it is. We’re flying high in Europe but can’t win a league match however flawed the opposition. We can out-flaw anyone in the Premiership.

So good luck to all those English teams tonight. Except Arsenal, obviously. Except Chelsea, certainly. Manchester City, on principle. Liverpool, because we must. And Newcastle, otherwise it wouldn’t be fair.

Happy Wednesday

A xxxx