Big Midweek: PSG v Newcastle, Man City, Liam Rosenior, Cristian Romero | OneFootball

It’s the final manic matchday eight in both the Champions League and Europa League, aka the week when we try desperately not to think too hard about what we could have had.

Imagine, if you will, a world where instead of letting almost everybody through, UEFA had instead chosen a better, less cowardly route in which only the top 16 qualified for the knockouts.

We used to have 16 teams in the knockouts, didn’t we? Worked fine for ages, that, didn’t it?

And if we’d kept that system, then the move to a 36-team mega-league would have been pretty much guaranteed every year to end in a magnificent scramble across 18 simultaneous matches to get above the cut line.

Just to give you a flavour of what UEFA took from you. If only the top 16 went through, the following clubs would be at some (often admittedly tenuous) risk of elimination heading into Wednesday night’s fun and games: PSG, Newcastle, Chelsea, Barcelona, Sporting, Man City, Atletico Madrid, Atalanta, Inter, Juventus, Dortmund.

Only the unstoppable European heavyweight juggernauts of Arsenal, Bayern, Real Madrid, Liverpool and Tottenham would be skipping into the final round of matches without a care in the world.

The worst thing about all this is of course that it’s feature not bug. There’s almost no real jeopardy on the madcap final round of matches because they built it that way.

And you still get people saying things like ‘No Europa League safety net these days!’ while not acknowledging that THEY SIMPLY REPLACED THE EUROPA LEAGUE SAFETY NET WITH A CHAMPIONS LEAGUE SAFETY NET.

But the main thing is, we don’t let it bother us. And there are still some decent final-night angles to work with, if we can keep our minds on finding them rather than rueing what might have been.

We can at least, for instance, console ourselves with the fact there is a non-zero chance we end up with all six Premier League sides inside the top eight, which would be plain nutty.

And Thursday’s Europa League action? Low-wattage, sadly. Aston Villa will finish very high inside the top eight, Nottingham Forest cosily in the play-offs.

Game to watch: PSG v Newcastle United

Still massive, this. Big game by definition in any week, obviously, but also perhaps the best game of the final night featuring two teams who are definitely coming back but for whom the range of possibilities is broadest.

It’s sixth v seventh in what is pretty much a play-off to avoid a play-off. Whoever wins would have to be on the wrong end of a logic-defying goal-difference swing to somehow fall out of the top eight, but whoever loses has almost no chance of staying above that particular cut line.

A draw probably condemns both to the play-offs, so there is potential also for late antics should the game be all-square heading into the final minutes.

For the winner, there also remains not just a top-eight finish but potentially even top four as a reward, which now carries some home advantage benefits into the early knockout rounds.

PSG lost 2-1 at Sporting last time out to miss the chance to all but secure a top-eight finish, while Newcastle have had a pretty solid campaign built on beating the teams they ought to beat.

They’ve sorted out Union St Gilloise, Benfica, Athletic Club and PSV by an aggregate score of 12-0, while losing to Barcelona and Marseille and drawing away at Bayer Leverkusen.

The bad news here, obviously, is that PSG fit more into the latter category of opposition than the former and have already slapped Spurs silly in a daft 5-3 earlier in the competition, while Newcastle come into the game on the back of a dispiriting home defeat to Aston Villa in the Premier League.

But there will likely be some nerves for Newcastle to exploit too, with the holders no doubt anxious to avoid a repeat of last season’s circuitous route to eventual glory. Well, the circuitous part anyway. They’d probably still settle for the eventual glory.

Team to watch: Man City

The only one of the six Premier League teams to enter the final matchday outside the automatic last-16 qualifying positions, which means their home clash with Galatasaray is perhaps the most significant game of the night when viewed through the Barclays lens, as everything must always be.

Having been handed an unlikely title-race lifeline by their local rivals at the weekend, City would now very much like to avoid giving themselves the headache of cramming two more games into an already packed run-in.

They’ve played themselves into trouble (or what passes for it in this Champions League format that we don’t let bother us) with a careless defeat at Bodo/Glimt last time out but should have enough to get a win that would probably be enough to secure a top-eight finish, even if the presence of five other clubs either side of that cut-line and level on points with City is a slight complicating factor. It’s in their favour, of course, that two of those six – PSG and Newcastle – face each other.

But Galatasaray have their own battles to fight, too. They are two points clear of 25th and therefore not yet safely into the play-offs, but are also only one point outside the top 16 and the possibility of a seeding in that play-off round.

Manager to watch: Liam Rosenior

There’s a case to be made that Napoli v Chelsea is the biggest game of the whole night, really. Napoli are arguably the biggest team to hit the final night sat outside the top 24 and, although they are level on points with three of the teams above them it’s still very possibly the case that only a win against Liam Rosenior and his ageing men will do.

Chelsea, meanwhile, are one of that cluster of clubs hovering around eighth with 13 points and knowing that a final-day slip condemns them to the play-offs.

There were none of these concerns for Rosenior in the Conference, where in a display of true High Performance he led Strasbourg to top spot with five wins and a draw from their six league-stage games.

Different game with different stakes now, but he’s made an excellent start to life at Chelsea and does have what is a rare chance at this stage of the competition to knock out a major force – a defending league champions no less – from one of the Big Four leagues.

Player to watch: Cristian Romero

With Arsenal as safe as it’s possible to be after seven wins from seven and Liverpool not far behind with only a home clash with Qarabag standing between them and the last 16, it’s to silly Spurs we turn for the player to watch.

A win at Eintracht Frankfurt to match the one they managed in the quarter-finals of the Europa League last season will guarantee a top-eight finish and could even seal a top-four finish from what, it must be said, has been a kindly set of fixtures.

No clearer is that than in the match that awaits them on the final day against an Eintracht Frankfurt side struggling to match last season’s efforts at home or in Europe, having already been eliminated from this competition and slipping to eighth in the Bundesliga, a run that cost Dino Toppmoller his job.

Concerns over their league form mean they will not be risking a host of players against Spurs, who have endured a miserable and worsening Premier League campaign but for whom this competition has provided welcome relief.

They could absolutely do without any more games in a February that already contains Premier League games against Man City, Man United, Newcastle and Arsenal, which makes this game an interesting one: winning it would genuinely help their relegation fight, so it probably is worth going for it even if the Champions League does seem an absurd luxury item for Spurs to be considering at this time.

And that means they likely will include their captain, a man who is currently operating on pure fury and has scored in each of his last three games for Spurs as he battles with fellow centre-back Micky van de Ven for the title of best finisher at this most absurd of football clubs.

Football League game to watch: Lincoln v Bradford

Second v fourth in League One, and a game that feels particularly big for the visitors, who still have games in hand on all three teams above them but have slipped off the automatic promotion pace after three defeats in their last four, including against fellow promotion hopefuls Cardiff and Huddersfield in their last two.

A third straight game against another team eyeing up the Championship next season is either curse or opportunity depending on how you view the fullness of the glass, and it is worth remembering that Bradford’s game in hand is at home against second-bottom Rotherham after a postponement earlier this month.