FC Copenhagen preview

As bad as our away league form has been, our away form in the UEFA Cup has been quite good. We won 2-0 at EB/Streymur seven months ago, in Mark Hughes' first competitive match. Then there was the (very fortunate) 1-0 win in Midtjylland and subsequent penalty triumph. Next up was the 2-1 win in Cyprus, when Jô scored two thirds of his Manchester City goals to date. In the group stages we won 2-0 in Schalke (one of our best performances this season) before losing 3-1 in Santander. So that's four wins out of five on our travels in Europe! (at home it's three wins one draw and one loss).

So we won't definitely lose tonight.

Despite the inclusion of the not-suspended Dunne and Wright-Phillips the team picks itself tonight. I'd be surprised if it wasn't this (my camera's playing up so I'll have to use words: Given; Bridge, Dunne, Onuoha, Richards; Kompany, Ireland, Zabaleta; Robinho, Bellamy, SWP). Of the two changes from Saturday we will miss Nigel de Jong (who has befallen the same fate as his fellow Dutchman Klass-Jan Huntelaar in this regard) more than Elano, with whom I am growingly increasingly tired.

I know very little about FC Copenhagen, other than that they have the great and much missed Niclas Jensen in their ranks (before we signed Wayne Bridge last month surely Jensen was our best left back of the 2000s?). Soccernet informs that they're second in the SAS-Ligaen, which has only ten days left of an almost three month long winter break. Before yesterday I would have said that a long break is a big detriment but CSKA Moscow and Zenit St Petersburg both got good results last night, despite the fact that the Russian Premier League ended a few months ago.

My predictions have been pretty poor recently, but I'm going to go for a drab 1-0 loss.