Uefa Cup Final 2009 - Preview

On Wednesday 20th May 2009 we will witness the last ever final of the Uefa Cup as we know it. The successor to the Inter-Cities Fairs Cup, which ran between 1955 and 1971, the Uefa cup was traditionally a competition for the runners up in a nation’s league however since merging with the Cup Winner’s Cup in 1999 it also invites the winners of certain domestic trophies to take part in the competition. In England these are the League and FA cup.

This year’s finalists Werder Bremen and Shakhtar Donetsk have not had an easy ride to the final and they have had to earn their plaudits as any finalist should.

Both sides have progressed via elimination from the group phase of the Champions League. Shakhtar faced Spurs, CSKA Moscow, Marseille and Dynamo Kyiv en-route and Werder took on the might of A.C. Milan, St. Etienne, Udinese and Hamburg.

Shakhtar have had a tendency to leave things late in the majority of their games in the competition this year, scoring only 2 of their 12 goals in the first half. Both coming against Marseille in the Quarter finals. Perhaps this is an indication of a good fitness routine being maintained throughout the Ukrainian winter break (December-March) and the freshness that comes with such a break.

Bremen on the other hand have had a disappointing season in the Bundesliga, currently sitting in 10th place and can only achieve a 7th place finish at best. This will leave them without any European football next season a situation that I’m sure they will do their best to counter. They have always been a very attacking side and this is very evident given their goal tally, 64 in the league and 15 in the Uefa Cup, however they have been blighted by their leaky defence letting in a bucketful of goals. Conceding over 2 goals in every tie in the competition this season.

Winning the trophy should help ensure that they enjoy the benefits of a European campaign. Shakhtar will not have this worry on their mind as they sit comfortably in second place in the Ukrainian Premier League and will enter the qualifying rounds for the Champions League and should at least guarantee them a place in the Group phase of the Europa League.

A more illustrious reason for both sides to go hammer and tong on Wednesday evening is that neither side has won the competition in their history. Bremen have won the Cup Winner’s Cup in 1992 but for Shakhtar this is their first appearance at the final of any competition at this level and a win would be a great achievement for them.

I think that despite Bremen’s attacking prowess, they are coming to the end of a long and arduous season, they have leaked goals and Shakhtar while nowhere near as potent up front as the Germans will be in their stride after the freshening winter break and their league form at the moment has been spotless. I will have to go for a 2-1 Shakhtar victory in normal time.

A tribute to Europe's strangest continental competition...

I found myself even more appalled than usual by the shabby nature of Channel Five’s UEFA Cup coverage last night. I mean, awful commentary and even worse punditry are a given on any match covered by Five, but what really struck a nerve was the apparent inability of the summarising commentators during the Portsmouth and Everton games to understand the away goals rule. After Portsmouth had brought the score back to 2-2 during extra time (which put them 4-2 up on aggregate) the summariser, whose name I can’t remember, declared that it was looking good for Portsmouth because now Guimaraes had to score twice in less than 10 minutes if they wanted to take the game to penalties. At the start of the Everton game (which was 2-2 on aggregate at the start of the night) the summariser was suggesting that Everton might employ cautious tactics in an effort to suffocate Standard Liege’s high tempo game and play for penalties. I have to assume that these two summarisers were once footballers themselves and so must have come across the away goals rule at some point in their careers, but even if they haven’t this is an awful gaffe for anyone to make, let alone two people on the same night who are supposed to know a thing or two about the game. Truly astonishing.

Anyway, enough of that. Something else which caught my attention last night was the revelation that Guimaraes did not represent Portsmouth’s first European opponents. That honour it so happens went to those giants of continental club football, Charlton Athletic in the first round of the 1992-93 Anglo-Italian Cup, perhaps the most pointless and ridiculous European competition ever created. Try to imagine the Intertoto Cup being played mid-season and without the prize of a place in the UEFA cup for the winners and you’d be on the right track. However, the mention of a tournament that everyone seems to have forgotten about but which provided European competition for such unglamorous clubs as Tranmere Rovers, Notts County and Port Vale has inspired me to take a closer look at this competition, hoping to discover why it came about and why it no longer exists.

The inaugural Anglo-Italian Cup was actually contested as far back as 1970. The competition came about as a result of a disagreement between the English Football Association and UEFA over the European governing body’s refusal to allow Swindon Town, winners of the 1969 Football League Cup, into the Inter-Cities Fairs Cup (now the UEFA Cup) because they were in England’s Third Division. The FA soon stuck a deal with their Italian counterparts to stage an annual competition between the teams from outside both country’s top divisions. The competition ran for four seasons before it was abandoned in 1973 with Swindon Town, Blackpool, AS Roma and Newcastle United (See! They have won a trophy during the era of colour television! They truly are a massive club!) winning one tournament each.

So marked the end of the first Anglo-Italian Cup. However, the tournament was to be resurrected in 1975 as a competition for English and Italian semi-professional teams. Running until 1987 this competition was dominated by the Italians, with Sutton United in 1979 providing the only English winners. An interesting side note to this competition should be that the inaugural final in 1976 featured Wimbledon, who only 12 years later would be winning the FA Cup against a Liverpool team many considered to be among the best teams in Europe. A remarkable rise indeed.

The professional Anglo-Italian Cup was to make a return in 1992 as a replacement for the Full Members Cup, a competition for the teams in the top two divisions of the Football League, which had been wound up after the formation of the Premiership had seen England’s top division break away from the Football League. The new Anglo-Italian Cup was to be contested by the teams from England’s First Division and Italy’s Serie B. The competition began with a preliminary group stage after which 8 English teams and 8 Italian teams would remain. Four groups of four teams, all comprising entirely of clubs from one country, would then be drawn with the English and Italian teams competing home and away in a round-robin style tournament with the eventual top team in each group advancing to the semi finals. Clubs from the same country played against each other in the semi finals in order to guarantee an international final, which was always held at Wembley. Again, the Italian clubs were to dominate with Notts County in 1994-95 providing England’s only winners. However, the competition was only to last for four years. A general indifference towards the competition existed between the clubs in both countries, who viewed it as a time consuming distraction from the domestic leagues and cup competitions. Fans also criticised the pointlessness of the competition, with no major prize awaiting the victors, and were put off by the violence that often accompanied the fixtures. The subsequent poor crowds for all but the final stages of the competition and the fact that it was not covered on any major television network meant that the tournament was not cost effective and was abandoned for good in 1996. While it was a commercial failure, the Anglo-Italian Cup did provide the opportunity for many clubs who would otherwise not have had the chance; to test themselves against continental opposition and provided Portsmouth with their first “European” tie, a 3-1 win over Charlton Athletic, more than 15 years before last night’s terribly analysed tussle with Guimaraes, something which the club and its fans should never forget.