No place to hide for Barca, Bayern and Inter in unforgiving Champions League group

Spare a thought, before the kick-offs in what looks the toughest of all the groups in this season’s Uefa Champions League, for the central defenders and goalkeeper of Viktoria Plzen, the Czech club who are supposedly making up the numbers in Group C.

Journeys like theirs are hard-fought, in Plzen’s case a marathon of pre-qualifiers that took them to Helsinki, Moldova and Azerbaijan. Having reached the main event, they promptly end up confronting Barcelona, Bayern Munich and Internazionale.

Seven years ago, Jindrich Stanek, the Czech champions’ keeper, was being fixed up with a gig at Hyde United, a non-league club in England’s north-west. He was on Everton’s books, a teenaged prospect, and they wanted him to see some competitive action, so loaned him out. He never got further than Everton’s bench during his time on Merseyside; on Wednesday he should make his debut in the Champions League proper, at Camp Nou, probably facing Robert Lewandowski.

That’s just one of the daunting prospects ahead for Stanek, and for Lukas Hejda and Ludek Pernica, an experienced pair of central defenders with an established partnership but only one minute’s worth of shared experience as a pairing in the Champions League group stage. That was back in 2018, the last time the club made it this far in Europe’s elite competition. After Lewandowski, they will probably be asked to marshal Inter’s Romelu Lukaku, who should be back to fitness next week, and, in matchday three, to keep pace with Bayern’s Sadio Mane.

Much of the intrigue around who finishes in the top two positions of Group C is focused on this illustrious trio of centre-forwards, all of them newly transferred in a summer market animated by the movements of top-class goalscorers. The