Taking Responsibility for England's Disappearance from Europe

As it does every year, the UEFA Champions League quarterfinal draw served up some mouth-watering match-ups headlined by what will be the seventh and eighth Madrid derbies of the season between Realand Atletico, followed by La Liga favorite Barcelona against reigning-but-fading French champ Paris Saint-Germain. Oh, and Bayern Munich also faces FC Porto, while Juventus finds itself paired withplucky AS Monaco.  

Just in case you missed the round of 16 — and the subsequent complaining and analyses that followed —  no English teams will be represented in the UCLquarterfinals (Note: they have also vanished from the Europa League). Sorry, Premier League fans. Not this year. And despite the finger-pointing (Mourinho: it’s the players!) and excuse-making (Wenger: it’s the away goals rule!) that followed the exits of Chelsea and Arsenal inparticular, the simple fact of the matter is that each of England’s three round of 16 representatives was deservedly beaten.

Per usual, the English papers are now asking themselves very serious questions about the state of the Premier League vs. other European leagues. After all,this is the second time in three years that team England has completely bowed out of the UCL at the round of 16 stage. Surely, it’s a crisis! Or maybe it’s just cyclical? Perhaps analyzingthe hell out of it will help them do better next year? 

What a load of garbage. Chelsea and Arsenal lost their respective series to PSG and Monaco simply because the players lost themental battle against their opponents — and Jose Mourinho and Arsene Wenger should take responsibility for that instead of pointing the finger elsewhere. At least ManchesterCity’s Manuel Pellegrini was gracious enough to acknowledge that his men were beaten by a better team, and in particular, one Lionel Messi, who looks back to his world-beatingbest.

As mentioned earlier, Mourinho decided to blame his players for a lack of confidence and concentration. While it’s certainly true that failing to defend set pieces is almost alwaysdown to a lack of concentration, Chelsea, and Mourinho specifically, is guilty over two games of setting his team up to do the absolute minimum required to progress to the next round. The Portugueseoften does this with his tactics, and it often works for him, too, because, as we all know, part of the Mourinho ethos is to be comfortable defending.

In the second half against PSG, OperationBare Minimum seemed to be going just fine, until Zlatan Ibrahimovic was sent off in the first-half. Suddenly, the Blues, who expected to defend their way into the quarterfinals, had an extraman. They had no idea what to do. Going for the jugular was obviously not what the players had prepared for, so they were unable to attack PSG effectively. In the end, the ten-men bossed the matchwith effective counter-attacking, and all four goals came from set-pieces. Mourinho was effectively beaten at his own game.

Now, to be fair to Arsenal’s Wenger, he blamed histeam’s exit on poor defending during the first-leg 3-1 loss at home to Monaco (you don’t say!), but since, he has tried to deflect attention away from that poor, poorperformance—which he certainly shares much of the blame for—by suggesting that “the weight of the away goals rule is too big”, or it’s “outdated,” somethinghe has complained vociferously about for years.

Incidentally, English clubs have exited the UCL five times in the pastten years on away goals (the most of major European leagues), and Arsenal has twice been on the receiving end of those exits, so it’s no wonder that the likes of Wenger and former ManchesterUnited coach Alex Ferguson don’t like it.

Now, Off The Post believes that everyone is entitled to their opinion, but again, let it not be said that Arsenal actually played bettersoccer than Monaco over two games. The Gunners approached that first game in London as though all they had to do to qualify for the quarterfinals was show up. The players were cocky, wasteful andlacking in concentration defensively, and for that, the fault must lie squarely at the feet of Arsenal’s coach.

Special thanks to Pellegrini for not blaming his players for or deflectingattention from City’s (admittedly) comprehensive defeat to Barcelona. It would be nice to see more coaches take responsibility for their part in their team’s failures, as well as theirsuccesses.