Friday, April 10, 2009

Hamburg SV-Manchester City

The UEFA Cup is often an underestimated tournament, standing at the shadow of the Champions League. Nevertheless, this is a bit unfair, as the quality is often as good as in the CL, and one gets to see some other excellent European teams which are more rare in the CL, that too often seems dominated by the same ten teams or so.
So last night I was in O'Leary's in Copenhagen with some friends to drink beer and watch the exciting quarterfinal in the UEFA Cup between Mancherster City and Hamburg SV, and it proved no disappointment: Manchester City scored after some 30 seconds, but then Hamburg played a splendid match to carry a well-deserved 3-1 victory home!
In another quarterfinal Werder Bremen defeated Udinese 3-1, and we may thus be looking at an all-German semifinal (and so, German football is not only symbolized by Bayern Munich's disaster in the CL) on the one hand, and an all-Ukrainian semifinal on the other, as both Shakhtar Donetsk and Dynamo Kiev managed to get good results against Olympique Marseille and Paris St. Germain respectively.

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