Get the Champions League draw bingo cards out for tonight as the great and the good – and the greedy – of Europe get together to get the balls out in Istanbul tonight. There will plenty of stuff to cross off as we go along. There will be some glamorous female presenter with a painted on smile and the kind of vacant captive to look like she should be blinking out an SOS.
There will be an assortment of legends of various ages doing the tombola routine, completely meaningless phrases like ‘football family’ and ‘football as a force for good’, and the whole thing will go on longer than a Boris Johnson holiday. There will also be a ton of people rolling out the old line about the Group of Death.
Ah, the Group of Death. Legend has it, this was a term first phrased by a Mexican journalist at the World Cup in 1970 when defending champs England were drawn with Brazil, Czechoslovakia and Romania. Back then it was because the section was more of a Mexican stand-off, as it meant all four teams had a chance to qualify.
