Claudius I don't agree really, I think it was designed to make sure if a big name has a wobble they could still be pretty much guaranteed to get through and that's really what happened. Look at City probably as bad as it gets for one of the *established" teams but they are still in the tournament. Maybe under the old format their early form would have seen them eliminated but this is the perfect example to me of why they made it this format. They want to stop any of the big names going out and that is really what happend. Now in the knock outs it's a reset from now what happened before isn't relevant.
I also still think once it's no longer novel it'll not be interesting , too many games, playing lots of the big teams more regularly makes those fixtures less interesting for me it should be a rarity to see the big teams meet in the later stages if teams are good enough to get there.
I didn't find these last round particularly interesting because everybody who was likely to go through did go through not really any surprises in the elimination. It hasn't really made things better I think. It's different and novel but I don't think it's a better tournament now.
