agree, the group stages have become really boring. biggest problem is that most of the 3 and 4 seeds are terrible, and the group stages are basically a formality.

it must've been really exciting back in the days before the internet when you'd only heard about certain teams through hearsay and had no idea how good they really were, or how differently their style of play actually was.

The tough group last year did us no favours at all. Ended up going to Dortmund in between Liverpool and away to United for example. I like the group stage to be as boring as possible. The competition only gets interesting from the last 16 stage anyway so may as well get through the groups with as little fuss as possible.

Armor wrote:

The tough group last year did us no favours at all. Ended up going to Dortmund in between Liverpool and away to United for example. I like the group stage to be as boring as possible. The competition only gets interesting from the last 16 stage anyway so may as well get through the groups with as little fuss as possible.

But we rarely get passed the 2nd round. So we may as well test ourselves and enjoy a contest in the group stages.

Why make the comp even more boring with a boring group.

Agreed. The seedings are pretty generous to still include us in Pot 1 too. As far as I understand it's based on CL performance in the last 5 years and we haven't got past the round of 16 in that time.

We've also not not got past the group stage, and we've generally been knocked out by very strong opposition. We deserve our seeding in my opinion, so if that's what the points system says I'll take it.

I like having good opponents in the group. We're good enough to go through anyway and it makes the group stage more watchable.

Armor wrote:

The tough group last year did us no favours at all. Ended up going to Dortmund in between Liverpool and away to United for example. I like the group stage to be as boring as possible. The competition only gets interesting from the last 16 stage anyway so may as well get through the groups with as little fuss as possible.

What tough group? :confused:
We were top seeds it was set up as easily as they could for us so as they'd get their glamour TV tie.

Tony Montana wrote:

But we rarely get passed the 2nd round. So we may as well test ourselves and enjoy a contest in the group stages.

Why make the comp even more boring with a boring group.

Because in a hard group you need to play your strongest team all the time. Remember Napoli away last year? Had to play a strong team and then we had less than 3 full days to recover for a huge game away to City when we were 6 points clear or something. That worked out great.

Armor wrote:
Tony Montana wrote:

But we rarely get passed the 2nd round. So we may as well test ourselves and enjoy a contest in the group stages.

Why make the comp even more boring with a boring group.

Because in a hard group you need to play your strongest team all the time. Remember Napoli away last year? Had to play a strong team and then we had less than 3 full days to recover for a huge game away to City when we were 6 points clear or something. That worked out great.

No we need to play our top team until we qualify regardless of competition.

We can't complain about not reaching the CL in one instance and then complain about having to play in it just because we have a tough game after a gruop game.

You can't play the strongest team in every game if players need a chance to recover. Something's got to give.

Of course the correct answer is to build a better squad that is capable of being rotated

Tony Montana wrote:

No we need to play our top team until we qualify regardless of competition.

We can't complain about not reaching the CL in one instance and then complain about having to play in it just because we have a tough game after a gruop game.

True but that Napoli game for example was the 6th game. In an easy group you can qualify after 5 games, maybe even 4. And the games themselves can be a lot less intense.

Sure playing in a tough group is exciting but i think overall it does more harm than good.

5 months later

Both Ospina and Szczesny are too young to be our first choice keepers.

:gape:   No Tony you're supposed to say- Why do you think thats controversial?

Arsene FC is by far the greatest team the world has ever seen.

He is a much better player than you want to admit though.

4 days later

Wilshere has performed better than Ramsey this season.

We're good enough to get to the CL final.