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While Football Daily has no intention of spoiling the finale of Curb Your Enthusiasm for any devotees who haven’t watched it yet, we’re giving nothing of any significance away by revealing its title is No Lessons Learned. We only mention it because it seems pertinent as Arsenal take on Bayern Munich in Big Cup later, on the latest step of their first foray into the competition since being humiliated by the German champions in 2017. It is fair to say that, unlike the misanthropic Larry David, Arsenal have learned plenty in the interim, as their lofty Premier League status and place in the quarter-finals suggests. However, it is in Big Cup that the biggest club in England never to have won the biggest of European pots that the Gunners have suffered consistent, varying degrees of embarrassment and this season they have another chance to put things right.
I initially misread Noble Francis’s missive (yesterday’s Football Daily letters). Instead of his witty reference to the Saudi-infused ‘Al Clasico’, I thought he was proposing the ‘AI Clasico’. My mind raced through ideas that artificial intelligence would propose to energise a football fanbase. I quickly landed on: a) half-and-half scarves, b) heavy use of VAR, c) an inconvenient kick-off time to accommodate stay-at-home viewers; and d) the requisite foreign neutral site to encourage even more kit-buying. There: the AI Clasico = the ill-fated 39th match idea” – Mike Wilner.
Re: the Amsterdam pea-souper (yesterday’s Memory Lane, full email edition). May I be one of 1,057 to point out that Ajax did not progress to the final that season. It was Celtic 2-1 Inter. The final you refer to was for the 1968-69 season. Perhaps your researcher had a bit of a brain-fog” – Jim Scullion (and 1,056 others).
