Hah!

Real Madrid is through to the next round too. Well, technically they were through before they came into this match because even if Zenit had won they were not going to get enough points to pass by Real Madrid, but it's official now. Again, it was all a matter of how many points Real Madrid was going to take today. Teams tend to not play particularly well when they know that they are going to go through (hello Barcelona!) and given all of Real Madrid's recent woes, I was interested to see how they would do. At first it looked pretty awful for them but then Raul got a nice goal when the other 'keeper dropped the ball and everyone took a collective sigh of relief. It was not the first time that the Zenit keeper was going to drop the ball after catching it but lucky for him it was the only time that cost his team a goal. As it was, the fact that the nets are huge proved to be the Russian team's downfall as Robben and Raul scored seven minutes apart in the beginning of the second half and Real Madrid woke up. I actually fell asleep and completely missed Robben's goal - yes, yes, it's the week of missing goals for poor little moi - but Raul decided that it would be nice if I saw Real Madrid score again when he took a pass from Robben and kicked it right over the Zenit 'keeper's head and it went sailing into the back of the net. The score could have been a lot tighter as Zenit got some pretty close calls but they hit the goal posts and the crossbar. Oops. So it's Real Madrid 3 Zenit St Petersburg 0 and Real Madrid ended up tied Juventus with 12 points because the stinkers couldn't beat Bate Borisov and tied 0-0 with them. Actually, Juventus ended up on top of their group but whatever. They still ended up with the same amount of points as Real Madrid. Hah! The teams that have gone through are:

Roma, Chelsea, Panatha...somethingrather from Greece, Inter Milan, Barcelona, Sporting, Liverpool, Atletico Madrid, Man U (boooo!), Villareal, Bayern, Lyonnais, Porto Arsenal, Juventus and Real Madrid.

So no more Champions League stuff until Feb. now and that probably means no more football for me until then because my TV never broadcasts "normal games". So no tennis until January and no more football until February. At least there's hockey!

Speaking of which.... there two topics I'm really getting tired of hearing about are 1) Sean Avery and 2) Matts Sundin but I'm going to say something on them anwyay and this will be the last time.

By talking about Avery and his six game suspension due to comments he made before Dallas' game against the Flames about his ex-girlfriend, is only giving him what he wants. He wants the attention. Why else did he call the news networks to come and listen to him deliberately say inflamatory remarks? So can we all just shut up about him now? Yes, it seems stupid that a guy who is a pain to everyone who knows anything about hockey, gets a six game ban for stupid comments when there are people who do serious physical damage to other players and get either less or no penalties for it. We know. The NHL is completely inconsistant in that matter. Move on and make a big production the next time that someone is seriously injured. The NHL will hopefully eventually respond once they realize that most people don't like to see guys get potentially life altering concussions.

And Sundin.... Apparently the Swede is finally ready to make a decision by the end of this week on where he's going. Really? Didn't he say that he would make his decision in... the summer? Oh right, he couldn't make up his mind so he was going to have an answer by the time the training camps started. Or was it then September that we would have an answer finally? The point is, this is getting so annoying now. This whole thing feels like it's dragged on longer than the American presidential campaign and at least that is finally over for now. The guy simply can NOT make up his mind for whatever reason. I don't know what the deal is with him but I for one am going to stop speculating about where he's going to end up. If he actually even makes up his mind to stay in the NHL at all. I'm still waiting for his retirement announcement. I refuse from now on to talk about Sundin until he either signs with a team or retires.