PART OF the mystique of the modern European Cup is that nobody since 1990 has managed to retain it; a mundane truth of the Uefa Cup is that no defending title-holder really wants to be asked to win it two years on the trot. But if Sevilla nurse the idea that they have done plenty over the 10 months since they beat Middlesbrough in the 2006 final to demonstrate that their proper place would be in the Champions League, those arguments will have to wait until next season. By then, they should be among the starters in the elite section.

For now, they look favourites to win the Uefa Cup again and Spurs can regard themselves unlucky to have drawn the club sitting second in La Liga in a quarter-final whose first leg, in Andalucia, falls slap bang in the middle of an important local fiesta. The city will be lively, the challenge for Spurs formidable and the danger of nasty flashbacks quite high. Sevilla’s leading scorer, indeed the most prolific marksman in Spanish football this term, is one of Spurs’ exes, Frederic Kanoute. His transformation from the inconsistent centre-forward of White Hart Lane to the totemic leader of an attractive and incisive Sevilla would be one of the reasons the club’s head coach, Juande Ramos, is earning himself a pan-European reputation.

There would be dozens of others. Ramos arrived in the summer of 2005 and has them playing with confidence and flair. When he joined, Sevilla had been four years back in the top flight after two relegations in the late 1990s, and although he was obliged to live with the sale of a pair of outstanding talents – the defender Sergio Ramos and the forward Julio Baptista both joined Madrid just as Juande Ramos came – what he inherited would be spectacular.

Sevilla may have the most exciting right-back in the game in Brazilian Daniel Alves, and the youth production line keeps working. While its two most celebrated recent graduates, Jose Antonio Reyes and Ramos, brought into the club the means to buy the likes of Kanoute, their academy successors have made sevillistas happily forgetful of how dazzling Reyes used to be before his career slalomed to Madrid, via Arsenal. There are those who judge Jesus Navas, another local winger, as better than Reyes and the 22-year-old Antonio Puerta as a more reliable patroller of the left flank.

Sevilla have twice beaten Barcelona in the past eight months, first in the European Super Cup and last month in the league, coming back from a goal down at their own ground. They beat Madrid there, too.

They are also still in the Spanish Cup and believe a treble is within their capabilities.