Tuesday, October 04, 2005
Uefa Group Stage
The draw for the Uefa cup group stage took place this lunch time, with Boro's fixtures meeting with mixed reactions. The teams we will face in group D are AZ Alkmaar (Holland), Dnipro (Ukraine), Grasshopers Zurich (Switzerland) and Litex Lovech (Bulgaria).The two home games will be against the Ukranian side, who made Tony Mowbray's Hibs look very ordinary with a 5-1 defeat over there in the 1st round, and the Bulgarian minnoes ranked lowest of our four opponents. On the plus side we have avoided some tricky away fixtures with Holland and Switzerland being easily accessable for the fans, and we have a good chance of 6 points at home. The down side is that our toughest game is away against the inform AZ, and that with little known teams coming to the Riverside the gates are likely to be on the smallish side. However, the most important thing is points to progress - 7 points from 12 are almost certainly enough and that is very do-able. It is both a blessing and a curse to miss out on any of the really big names, but we can save Roma for the later rounds, eh?
All in all a lot to look forward to. First fixture is 20th October at Grasshoppers'.
