Some poor video choices on YouTube for the Bayern-AC Milan and Liverpool-PSV games yesterday. That is fitting with these games, really. Liverpool had already all but officially wrapped up advancing to the semis after a 3-0 blasting of PSV in the first leg.

Bayern pulled a rabbit out of its hat managing a draw in the closing seconds at Milan. Even playing at home with the return of Mark von Brommel and Victor Kahn, Milan proved too much with two goals scored close together in the first half, and cruised to the win after that.

Hmm… I can’t find a Liverpool-PSV highlight at all. Best I’ve got is the crowd singing, “You’ll Never Walk Alone” for over 4 minutes recorded on some guy’s phone. That is definitely not worth our time.

7-1 win by Manchester United over AS Roma. Wow. Now that is some goal scoring dominance like I’ve never seen in a game at this level. Lets rank these goals from most impressive to least impressive, and then cue the highlights so you can be the judge.

1. Goal #2, Alan Smith – Beautiful one-touch passing up three-quarters of the field. Turns out to be the game winner as a bonus.
2. Goal #6, Michael Carrick – With no hesitation, turns and fires into the top corner from 25 yards.
3. Goal #3, Wayne Rooney – Roma looks completely overmatched on this one as ManU moves up the field. Perfect cross by Ryan Giggs and flick by Rooney.
4. Goal #4, Cristiano Ronaldo – More of a one-man show on this one, but what a show. He was itching to get in on the goal scoring at this point.
5. Goal #1, Carrick – An unexpected strike catches the keeper out of position, and kicks off the fireworks.
6. Goal #5, Ronaldo – More nice passing to set up a another cross by Giggs which manages to find Ronaldo for an easy convert.
7. Goal #7, Patrice Evra – A nice effort.

It took the full-time to get a decision on this one, but Chelsea prevails over Valencia in what turned out to be a much closer competition than our pool picks (heavily favouring Chelsea) would seem to indicate.

More people picked Manchester United and Chelsea to advance from the quarters in our Champions League pool. Wouldn’t you know Roma and Valencia hold the upper hand after the first Leg.

Champions League started up again yesterday after a long layoff with the quarter-finals, and boy did it not disappoint.

Excellent action in the AC Milan-Bayern Munich match. AC Milan is the only team still alive in this year’s tournament that made it as far as the quarter-finals a year ago. They looked to be in good shape starting at home against Bayern, who were down two notables, keeper Oliver Kahn and midfielder Mark van Brommel. Thanks to some incredible goal keeping by Michael Rensing (seriously, two insane saves in the first half) and scrappy play to the final seconds (literally!), Bayern earned a 2-2 draw and now look to be in the driver’s seat.

A lopsided affair in the Liverpool-PSV Eindhoven match, but many a Liverpool fan will be happy today with a practically guaranteed pass to the semi-finals. It was a 3-0 drubbing of PSV on impressive goals by Steven Gerrard, John Arne Riise and Peter Crouch.

Once these games kicked off then the picks appeared in our Champions League Pool, and it sure looks like there could be a fair bit of movement in the standings after this round. Our top 4 entries each picked a different pair of winners from the opening two matches. One of them is going to get both right, and one is going to get both wrong.

There is more consensus in the picks from today’s matches, Roma-Manchester United and Chelsea-Valencia, but the bonus points for the goal predictions will be a big factor, as could a Roma or Valencia upset shake things up.

The Round of 16 is decided in the Champions League, and the results are updated in the pool. We finish our opening round with a three-way tie for first place between andrewg, craigbuckley and Ruthard each with 30 points. Props to johnnyzamps who was the only person to hit 4 of 4 right yesterday and sits just behind the leaders with 28 points.

My personal downfall was backing Celtic, but I couldn’t go against the green and white jersey hanging in my closet. Yep, I let my heart dictate my picks instead of using my head. Predictably, that didn’t work out very well.

Today I will add the next round games to the pool so we can make our picks for those. On to the highlights:

Leg 2 of the first knockout round got underway yesterday. The scores are updated in the Champions League Pool, and overall, a pretty poor showing as far as predictions go. Ten of 21 only hit 1 of the 4 teams to advance. No one scored a perfect 4 of 4. Most people overshot on the goal predictions too, but we did have a few 5 point bonuses for hitting right on the number of goals. It will be interesting to see how it shakes out after today.

At least the predictions weren’t as bad as my indoor soccer game last night. That was down right pitiful. A disgrace. Our worst outing this decade. Hopefully that is out of our system as the playoffs are quickly approaching. Time for some inspiration with highlights from yesterday:

I’ve been working on a top secret project. My mind is mostly there (and I can’t say anything about it), so I don’t have enough material for a single worthwhile topic this morning. I’ll just jump around with a few things I’m thinking about.

• Thanks to those of you who have sent emails with feedback on the Baseball Cheatsheet Compiler & Draft Buddy. Some of the top requests for improvement so far include:
  • Show players eligible for multiple positions at each position in the cheatsheet
  • Add an overall ranking cheatsheet
  • Add tiering
  • Add more stat categories

  I definitely agree points 1 and 2 need to be addressed, but these issues are complex which may prevent this getting accomplished soon. I realize the Baseball Compiler & Buddy are still a couple notches behind the features of the football version. We’ve made really great strides with baseball this year, and hope to continue to the point where it gets on par with football.

• For those of you using the Baseball Compiler, even if you haven’t emailed me, make sure to add yourself to my Compiler mailing list so I can let you know about future updates, fixes, etc. To add yourself to the list just send an email to this address.

• The final 2 teams are qualified for the under-20 FIFA World Cup tournament scheduled for Toronto this summer. They are Mexico and Costa Rica adding to the first 22 I mentioned in my prior U20 World Cup post. The official draw is scheduled for this Saturday, March 3 at 4:30pm ET. My soccer buddies and myself will have to schedule our own draft for tickets soon after. Time to start sending out some dis-information about how I will sell the farm to see all matches with Jordan and Congo.

• Not much happening on the football front. NFL Network televised a lot of the scouting combine. As if everyone didn’t think they were some sort of draft expert before, this wall-to-wall coverage should only exacerbate the problem.

• Much like you I’m sure, I am pretty tired of the bland site design of MyOfficePool.ca. A site re-design is in the works.

Argh! Its bad enough I rant yesterday about TSN and their inability to televise live Champions League action. Today, I have to rant about my Bell Sympatico internet service. It was out when I started the computer this morning, and finally just returned in the last hour, for a nifty 12+ hours of downtime. That is very convenient for someone trying to run an internet business…

Really, I haven’t had too much trouble with my Bell service overall, but one can’t help but wonder if there is a better option out there. The hour tech support call I embarked on today running through 2 levels of support people to finally have the second one tell me they need to escalate to a third level, who should see to the problem in 24-48 hours, was not at all comforting that I, as the customer, was the least bit important to them.

But, I do give them acceptable marks for at least working out the problem much quicker than the estimate. I do get a good deal on my long distance (with Bell). My cell phone plan sucks (also Bell). I need to remedy that one of these days.

Final point jumping back to TSN and Champions League coverage: I did find Wednesday that TLN (Telelatino) televised the Inter Milan-Valencia first leg match. Non-English commentary mind you, but it is inside the Rogers cable package that gets you up to channels in the 40s and 50s, which most people have. It was a quality match too. Unfortunately I’m not finding highlights for it, but I did find these:

For those of us in Canada, or at least English speaking Canada, we really get screwed on the TV broadcast coverage of Champions League. Not a single game from the first leg of the first knockout round was televised live yesterday. The only way to see it on your regular TV was if you are a subscriber to Le Réseau des sports (RDS), a French sports channel. This is a specialty channel requiring additional subscription to my already excessively bloated cable bill, to watch the game in French. Not exactly my cup of tea.

Now, I did find a legal, online option which is paying $9.95 US linked through UEFA.com to pick one game on a pay-per-view basis. I decided to bite the bullet and watched the ManU-Lille game on my old desktop with 17″ CRT. Not exactly the same video quality of my 50″ Sony. Hmm… considering RDS is about $8 per month, I do see the odd decision here sacrificing video quality, for more money, to listen to English commentary instead of French. I’ll have to re-think my priorities on this one.

Great game, with exciting highlights and of course, lowlights with the confusion about Lille continuing the game after Ryan Giggs’ winning strike. Avoiding that subject here, who did my $9.95 go to? TSN Canada. Ugh. The same blokes who are airing The Scotties (huh? since when did this change?) Tournament of Hearts (a.k.a. curling) through the Champions League matches.

Sure, TSN did play a couple games on delay after midnight last night, but that hardly fits into the typical family-work-family-collapse daily schedule that most of us are on. It is what is, as they say. And what it is, is frustrating.

Checking today’s schedule TSN is playing Celtic-AC Milan at 1:00 pm. Yes, this game was played yesterday. Then more curling through the afternoon. There should be some sort of discount package if you buy multiple PPV games.

For those who don’t want to do the search on YouTube, here are some highlights from yesterday:

139 Days! (As of February 11th.) Less than 5 months until the Under-20 FIFA World Cup (that’s football, not American football) tournament kicks off in Canada of all places! Games will be hosted in Burnaby, Edmonton, Montreal, Ottawa, Victoria and … Toronto (duh)! On the heels of the 2006 FIFA World Cup Germany, this is a very exciting development indeed.

When news spread about the tournament and ticket availability, I quickly got a plan in place and worked the email and phones to make it go. First step, I had to become a Toronto FC member to jump the line for the W.C. tickets before the general public. Next step was to rally my soccer buddies into a package to give us the best seats and broadest access to the Toronto events.

The original plan was for 9 of us, myself included, to buy 4 tickets for all 9 Toronto events. This would entitle each person (each share), to 2 tickets to 2 events. Since we all know each other, no one should really care who they happen to sit with. Once the match schedule is set, then we’ll have a random draw for draft position to pick the events we want to go to. Here is the Toronto event schedule:

1. Sunday July 1 – Opening Ceremonies – Group A: A1 vs. A2

2. Monday July 2 – Group Double Header – Group C: C3 vs. C4 & C1 vs. C2

3. Thursday July 5 – Group Double Header – Group C: C2 vs. C3 & C4 vs. C1

4. Sunday July 8 – Group Double Header – Group C: C1 vs. C3 & Group A: A2 vs. A4

5. Wednesday July 11 – Round of 16 – 1st Group D vs. 3rd of Groups B/E/F

6. Thursday July 12 – Round of 16 – 1st Group E vs. 2nd Group D

7. Saturday July 14 – Quarter-Final Match

8. Thursday July 19 – Semi-Final Match

9. Sunday July 22 – 3rd Place Match & Final (double header)

Nice. Toronto gets a playoff game every step of the way, plus the Final. Here is hoping I get the first or second pick in the draft. I’ll be picking that Final. Also, here is hoping Groups A and C are strong, competitive groups since we’re going to see each of those teams at least once.

We did well on tickets. Midfield, 18 rows up, falling within the most coveted spectator section of the new stadium, BMO Field, not including the sidelines.

Now the big question when we bought the tickets was, what teams are going to be there? At the time we knew one – Canada as the host. Now it is a lot more clear, with only 2 CONCACAF teams yet to be decided late February. Check it:

• Asian Football Confederation
  1. Korea DPR
  2. Japan
  3. Korea Republic
  4. Jordan
• Confédération Africaine de Football
  1. Gambia
  2. Congo
  3. Zambia
  4. Nigeria
• Confederation of North, Central American and Caribbean Association Football
  1. USA
  2. Panama
• Confederación Sudamericana de Fútbol
  1. Brazil
  2. Argentina
  3. Uruguay
  4. Chile
• Oceania Football Confederation
  1. New Zealand
• Union des Associations Européennes de Football
  1. Spain
  2. Scotland
  3. Czech Republic
  4. Austria
  5. Poland
  6. Portugal
• Host
  1. Canada

This is going to be sweet! I can’t wait for our big draft event, which hopefully we can arrange live in conjunction with a Champions League game.

The only downside on all this is I had to cut my annual Blue Jays tickets purchase out of the budget. If you ever needed a sign the Jays are finally going to make it back to the post-season, this just might be it.