No all-England final, please

PLEASE, please, please, can we avoid having an All-England Champions’ League decider? Please? At least, yesterday’s quarter-final and semi-final draw kept two of Blighty’s finest apart, and I think we should be thankful for small mercies.

Already, there is a sensory overload building up around the Arsenal-Liverpool clash, but I fear this would only be small beer compared to the Niagara of hyperbole which would saturate a final pitting, say, the ‘Pool against their loving neighbours Man U.

From its inception, the essential beauty of the European Cup was that it took clubs out of their domestic comfort zones and exposed them to the very different challenge of playing teams from other countries in alien surroundings. Down all the years, the novelty value may have worn somewhat thin (and the more recent admission of non-champions made a mockery of the tournament’s redesign) but the roll call of great finals would still be dominated by the kind of thrilling culture clashes which saw Real Madrid beat Eintracht Frankfurt 7-3 in Glasgow in 1960.