Hopefully SoccerAge is consistently wrong. Juve and Inter are both through to the semis. It's now down to Milan. Serie A is now officially back. Not that we actually went anywhere to begin with.
If Milan go through, there should be no boasting and bragging, saying Serie A is clearly the best etc... Serie A fans should know, more than anyone, that results sometimes go for you and sometimes against. Anyone can beat anyone else on any given day.
But it should shut up those idiots who say crap like "Serie A is second rate and is nowhere near the Prem. or La Liga."
Only for the time being, of course. And in their place you'll get the old "Italian football is negative and boring" thing.
I can feel that UEFA Coefficient going back up up and up. Now if only Lazio can somehow pull off a miracle in their UEFA Cup semifinal ...
We are now currently 2nd behind Spain overall. But strangely we are also second in this years coefficients behind Spain. Even though we have four clubs still alive and Spain only one. http://www.xs4all.nl/~kassiesa/bert/uefa/index.html
It's because the result of each game is counted separately, even in a 2-leg tie. All those wins for Barcelona built up their coefficient even though they mean diddly squat in the competition right now.
What will the Inter - Milan semi do to the coefficients? Since one team wins and the other loses, wouldn't they both negate each other? Juve beating Real will certainly help...is it possible though? I'm kinda scared with no Davids, etc in the first clash.... By the way, the pundits are right. Serie A looked bland in the semifina;s from what I read. I know winning is more important than playing attractive football, but the papers hailing catenaccio is not the right thing to do, in my opinion.
Just like in league standings, points are awarded for wins and draws, none for losses. So there would be no "negation" effect. They still use 2 pts for a win, so Italy will get 4 points from the derby (plus one bonus point for an Italian team reaching the final), no matter what happens in the semifinals. this number is then divided by 7, the number of Italian team originally competing in Europe this season, giving Italy a MINIMUM of 15.07 points for the season and an overall coefficient (5-yr total) of 61.454. Still way behind Spain's (current) 75.299, but at least more comfortably ahead of England's 58.340 and - more importantly since 4th place only gets 3 CL spots - well ahead of Germany's 51.132.