Thursday brings us a full slate of games in the UEFA Europa League. To answer the question you’re no doubt thinking ‘yes, it is a pain keeping track of the seemingly endless array of league competitions, national cup competitions, European Cup competitions, so on an so forth’. The Europa League used to be called the ‘UEFA Cup’, and this is the first year under the new name. The premise is to set up a competition that countries outside of the world soccer elite could be competitive in. To some extent at least, its worked–a Ukrainian team (FC Shakhtar Donetsk) is nominally the defending champion though for all ‘official’ purposes they were the final UEFA Cup champion and the eventual winner this year will be the inaugural Europa League winner. FC Shakhtar Donetsk defeated Werder Bremen from Germany’s Bundesliga to win the Cup last year.

Still, International soccer remains a very top heavy sport and despite the Europa League/UEFA Cup’s egalitarian motivations and throughout its history has been dominated by–you guessed it–the traditional soccer powers.  Italian teams have won the most UEFA Cups and 26 of the 38 victors were from Italy, England, German or Spain.  The dynamic has changed somewhat and teams from Eastern Europe have done well in recent years.  In addition to Shakhtar Donetsk’s win last year since 2000 there have been two Russian teams that have won as well as a Turkish winner.    In fact, the game we’re going to talk about offers just that sort of East vs. West dynamic.

UEFA EUROPA LEAGUE–LIVERPOOL VS. UNIREA URZICENI

Note:  Game starts 10 AM Pacific/1 PM Eastern Thursday

Unirea Urziceni is a team based in Urziceni, Romania and this is something of a ‘David vs. Goliath’ scenario.  Liverpool plays its home games in the 45,000 seat Ansfield Stadium.  That’s even considered cozy by English Premier League standards and they’ve got plans to move into a 60,000+ seat venue in the near future.  Unirea Urziceni plays their home games in a 7,000 seat stadium though this contest will take place at the 27,000 seat Stadionul Steaua in Bucharest.  This won’t be a raucous venue like a neutral site college football rivalry–the stadium won’t be anywhere near full and up to half of the crowd could end up being Liverpool supporters who have traveled to back their team.

Liverpool won the opening leg of this aggregate score elimination round 1-0 at home, though Unirea Urziceni held their own and kept their opponent off the board for most of the game.  They played a conservative, defensive oriented game designed to frustrate the Liverpool offense.  They do this not so much by choice as by necessity as they simply don’t have the playmakers and offensive threats up front to prevail in a more wide open contest.  Compounding their problems in this game is the fact that they’ll be without arguably their best player, Pablo Brandan who is suspended due to bookings.

Unfortunately for Unirea Urziceni, they’re not going to be able to play the same conservative style here.  They’ll need to try to attack as they need a two goal win to advance.  The problem is that they simply don’t have the talent to hang with an upper level English Premier League team in this style of game.  Liverpool will want to score early and then they can play a defensive style and wait to capitalize on the inevitable mistakes from a Unirea Urziceni side that will need to score goals to make up the deficit.

This situation also makes a draw unlikely.  While Liverpool would settle for a draw, Unirea Urziceni needs a win and will be on the attack.  This will open up opportunities for Liverpool to score.  What Unirea Urziceni was hoping to do was to get a draw on Liverpool’s home pitch, but when that didn’t happen it sort of screwed up their whole strategy and now they’ll need to play a style they’re not really capable of in order to advance.  This can only benefit Liverpool, who will capitalize on their opponents’ mistakes for an easy goal or two–and an easy victory.  Price below is from Bookmaker:

PLAY LIVERPOOL -143 OVER UNIREA URZICENI