Kind draw lets Devils, Gunners experiment

AFTER one of the better Champions League last-16 draws in recent memory, perhaps it is unsurprising that the Europa League lacked the same lustre.

UEFA’s second-tier competition is only at the round of 32 stage and just two of the eight drop-outs from the Champions League – Internazionale and Bayer Leverkusen – hail from one of the five major domestic leagues.

The British clubs largely landed safely. Manchester United and Arsenal will both play teams who were eliminated from the Champions League but, as group winners, they avoided the likes of Ajax and Red Bull Salzburg.

United will instead face Club Brugge, who took the fewest group stage points of the eight drop-outs and who they beat in the 2015-16 Champions League playoffs.

Arsenal’s task is a little tougher. For the ninth and 10th times over the past decade, they meet Olympiakos, who travel back to north London after scaring Tottenham in the Champions League group stages.

Ultimately though, both United and Arsenal’s draws are kind enough to keep their Europa League rotation policies in place.

Neither Ole Gunnar Solskjaer nor Freddie Ljungberg – or Emery’s eventual successor – are likely to feel as though they have to name first-choice line-ups until at least the last-16 or quarterfinals.

But still, if a top-four Premier League finish appears unlikely for either United or Arsenal come February, it may be time to redirect resources.

In what could be the most evenlymatched tie of the round – Erling Braut Haaland’s Red Bull Salzburg play a talented Eintracht Frankfurt.

If Salzburg can keep Haaland and Takumi Minamino beyond January, they will stand an excellent chance of winning the Europa League. But it may well be that Haaland is a United player, by then while Minamino is pencilled in to join Liverpool.

This season, the rise and expected disintegration of Salzburg offers an extreme example of the power dynamics at play in European football.

This draw, good but nowhere near as glamorous as the Champions League offering, does much the same. – The Independent