All the fun of the fair for Gunners under ex-coach

THE team bus pulled away from Arsenal’s training ground and the club’s superstars glanced out of the windows in disbelief.

There, in the media car park near the entrance at London Colney, was a funfair with a selection of rides.

None of the Gunners’ multi-million pound players had ever seen anything like it before as they left the state-ofthe-art training base for an away game.

Incredibly, Arsenal’s former high-performance director Darren Burgess had laid it on for a kids’ birthday treat and he did not travel with the team, but drove himself up later that night after the party. It must go down as one of the most bizarre things ever seen at a Premier League training ground.

Burgess was nicknamed ‘The Tour Guide’ because he laid on hundreds of visits for people, largely Australians, to look round London Colney – which was supposed to be a highly-focused place of work for one of the Premier League’s biggest clubs.

Aussie Burgess (above, right, with ex-gunners boss Arsene Wenger) was sacked last summer after an unsuccessful two-year spell, but not before culling some of the club’s most trusted and long-standing staff.

THE reshaping of the Champions League is still some way off – with no agreement in sight between the European Clubs’ Association and UEFA to take forward their proposals.

What seems the most preferred option is a 32-team, Swiss-style model with 10 group games for each team.

But the coronavirus crisis engulfing sport is only likely to hold things up, and the end of the year is a more realistic timescale for any agreement.

PORTSMOUTH have been allocated 50,000 tickets for their Football League Trophy final with Salford City - and have sold 42,000 even before putting them on general sale. Their support is different class. UEFA’S shake-up for qualifying for European teams for the 2022 World Cup has largely gone under the radar, but has the potential to make it more exciting. The 10 group winners will automatically book their places for Qatar, but then the 10 runners-up plus two best group winners from the Nations League will go into a 12-team mini-tournament for the three remaining places. Three play-off paths will be formed, with two semifinals each in a single game knockout, and the winners going to a one-off play-off final. Sounds complicated? Probably. But it does add some spice and added drama to the World Cup play-offs.