Liverpool, Roma and Monaco make a bravura return to Champions League
Liverpool’s Brendan Rodgers, who will take his side into the Champions League after an outstanding performance in the Premier League. Photograph: Tom Jenkins
For any club with European pedigree, a return to the Champions League after a few years of absence brings an understandable thrill. For Liverpool, five times winners who have spent the past five seasons either knocking around in the Europa League or out of continental competition altogether, watching this year's final will simply whet the there is an interesting trend that links three clubs returning to the Champions League next season after a break. Liverpool, Roma and Monaco all qualified by making eye-catching inroads in their domestic competitions while they were free of any European distractions. None of them played any overseas football at all this past season. This left them to concentrate more intensely on their gameplan, on progressing a way of playing, on invigorating their style. They benefited from the luxury of being able to train creatively and with continuity. It is a pattern of which some top coaches would be enviable, even though competing in the best competition plus a serene training schedule is a sum that unfortunately won't add obviously no manager of a Champions League club would ever get away with expressing any wistfulness observing the work of teams who are not dining out in Europe but all top developmental coaches would welcome more practice time. The squeeze on the timetable that becomes cluttered by the extra preparation, travel and recovery that European football demands, leaves much less time for the most rewarding work does not feel like a coincidence that two of the teams whose style took off last season were Liverpool in the Premier League and Roma in Serie A. The Anfield attack ignited by Brendan Rodgers, which made sparks fly when Luis Suárez, Daniel Sturridge, Raheem Sterling and company set off into enemy territory, has the potential to scare any opposing defence (but let's not get so
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