THE Uefa Cup is a chalice whose contents range from the poisonous to the ambrosial, depending on who is doing the sipping. For the pampered players of Bayern Munich, for example, the very fact they have to board a flight from Bavaria to Aberdeen this week is sufficient humiliation. Having their name engraved on Europe's ugly-sister trophy would merely fix a season's relative failure in the record books.
For a team like Villarreal, with ambitions of breaking into Spanish football's elite, a European trophy would be a significant milestone. Rangers can also cling to the quixotic dream of going one step further than Martin O'Neill's Celtic team, becaus
e, let's face it, all Old Firm successes boil down to a strictly parochial relevance.
The hopes of sides like Rangers, in the second tier of the 32 teams going into this week's matches, is that the truly big clubs, who have ended up in the Uefa Cup through incompetence or underachievement, might not be all that interested in the competition. The real danger, though, comes from the ambitious and in-form sides looking to underwrite their progress with significant silverware.
The best example of what success in this competition can do for a club is Sevilla, the Spanish team which has won the last two finals, destroying Steve McClaren's Middlesbrough 4-0 in Eindhoven in 2006 and edging out Español on penalties at Hampden Park last May. Triumph in a European competition turned a moribund provincial club into serious contenders for the Spanish title, and made Juande Ramos one of Europe's most coveted managers.
Ramos knows better than anyone the fillip Uefa Cup success can provide. With little to play for in the Premier League, his Tottenham team might profit from concentrating their considerable resources on this competition. Tottenham are one of several clubs in the competition who already have a European trophy to their name. Success here would be the most spectacular way of announcing the club's recovery from the doldrums.
The Spanish sides tend to take the competition seriously, with five La Liga teams reaching the last seven finals, and three wins in the last four. Villarreal, Atletico Madrid and Getafe are still involved this season. Villarreal's fortunate win in Murcia on Saturday put them third in the table, while Atletico lie in fifth. Both have earmarked a Champions League place for next season, but neither would object to a successful run in the Uefa Cup. Villarreal are the best-equipped, having reached a Champions League semi-final in 2006, where they were unfortunate to lose to Arsenal.
President Fernando Roig's fortune was made providing ceramic bathroom fittings to all Spain, but obviously there is a limit to how many toilet bowls he can flog. The club had to wave adios to the expensive stellar playmaker Juan-Roman Riquelme, and goalscorer Diego Forlan (now with Atletico), but have somehow contrived to look a stronger side without them. Manuel Pellegrini's team lacks obvious stars. Up front, one Manchester United reject, Giuseppe Rossi, is adapting well in place of another, Forlan. Pellegrini is doing a sterling job in eliciting the last dregs of Robert Pires' talent, while Santi Cazorla and Joan Capdevila dovetail brilliantly on the left.
The curse of inconsistency may afflict Atletico's challenge, although they have the best line-up seen at the Vicente Calderon for several seasons. Their visit to Bolton on Thursday will be an intriguing culture clash, Atletico's pretty patterns coming up against Bolton's stubborn resilience.
One of the most creative and technically-adept Spanish players left in the competition lines up for one of the dark-horse contenders to lift the Cup. Mikel Arteta has been in the best form of his career at Everton, and changed a dull team into an exciting one. His club has one of the easiest draws of the round against the Norwegians of Brann Bergen. If Everton emerge with a decent result from a trip to the fjords on Wednesday, they could start to think seriously about the competition.
David Moyes, never easily mistaken for a ray of sunshine, will hold fast to the notion of domestic priorities, but he must know that no manager ever made a name for himself by finishing fourth. If he wants to be the Scottish Juande Ramos (admittedly a bizarre concept), winning the cup in Manchester in May might be a step in the right direction.
The full article contains 746 words and appears in The Scotsman newspaper.
