We’re going back to Bruges. The result will be different.
The idea of playing in Europe is to visit different places and experience different cultures, or something. It shouldn’t be about going to the same place twice in four months, even if it is one of the biggest tourist traps in the western hemisphere.
Everyone who went to Bruges last time seems to have enjoyed themselves. We had 1,400 watching the match where they should have been and a few in other places. The same’s likely to happen on Tuesday. This is, of course, perfectly acceptable when we do it but the end of the world when it happens at Villa Park.
The team we’re playing are Club Brugge KV to give them their proper name. They’ve won four out of the last five Belgian titles and as they were when we played them last time, they’re currently second in the league. The Belgian top division is the Jupiler League, named after a beer. There are something like 18,000 Belgian beers and 17,998 of them are better than Jupiler. It’s like when the Premier League was sponsored by Carling.
Everyone knows what happened last time we played here. Tyrone Mings had a bit of a brainstorm and gave away the winning penalty. If he hadn’t done that and we’d got a draw we’d have been playing Bayern now, which would have been as good as a bye into the quarter-finals. As it is we’ve got the chance to make up for it. Tyrone might be playing, or he might be injured. I know it’s unlikely that a Villa player might be out but the prospect has to be faced.
They don’t seem to have done much business in the transfer window while we added a few more world-beaters. Win this one, make sure the second leg’s a formality then start to think about going somewhere different.
