CL draw and Villa present tough tests

The less said about the other night the better.

Thank god we got through but I suppose as a punishment of sorts for making such hard work out of the tie with Standard Liege we've been handed the Group of Death.....or Group D as most of you may know it.

I have to say I think there is some injustice that the most successful English side in the competition over the last three or four seasons gets the hardest group of the four Premier League teams.

Whilst Chelsea and Man United get the bloody Romanian and Danish champions respectively we get four big hitters from three of the top European leagues including dark horses Atletico Madrid who are easily the best of the fourth seeded teams and probably better than most of the third seeded lot.

The other teams in the group, PSV Eindhoven and Marseille, are well known to us from recent seasons.

PSV were seen off at the group stages and in the quarter finals en route to that awful night in Athens two seasons ago whilst Marseille secured an unlikely late victory at Anfield before they were dispatched with ease in the final group game of last season's tournament.

As Rafa said, it's a tough group but we'll just have to get on with it.

Our form is not great at the moment as we all know and we've done the bare minmum to scrape six points out of two games in the league and tumble into the group stages of the Champions League.

It's been a well used line over the last few weeks about how a good title challenging team always gets results even when they play poorly but we had better start playing better and soon.

Villa away this weekend provides a much sterner test than anything we've faced so far and with all the furore over Gareth Barry, an extra element is added to this match up.

An even better sign of a real title challenging team is getting all three points from places like Villa and that's got to be the aim on Sunday afternoon.