^^Xavi's injured


Defensively, still leaked a few decent chances. Against a better side we would have conceded more. One clean sheet in the last 11 away games?

Looked better overall though, controlled the game for the most part. Messi stepped it up and Sanchez impressed again. Should finish them off with ease at home.

Done and dusted. . . Great to have Messi back amongst the goals.

Barça's starting line-up: Valdes, Alves, Puyol, Mascherano, Abidal, Busquets, Iniesta, Cesc, Adriano, Alexis and Messi

I won't say the level of defending in La Liga is poor. . . All but one of the defenders in the FIF PRO XI play in the EPL - Vidic. The rest play in Spain.

There are quality defenders in La Liga. Ramos, Rami, Masch, Cabral, Gonzalo Rodriguez, Pique, Filipe Luis, are some of the best in the business.

The thing is the league is very attack minded. Teams hardly ever sit back and park the bus regardless of who they are playing against.

You find a team like Levante trying to attack Madrid at Bernabeu. Madrid with all that fire power. . . There's no way they are not gonna ship in goals and be made a mess of.

Defensive football is seriously frowned upon in Spain.

valacious:

I think seun owns or is in partnership with this particular school. Kudos all the same.

His parents own the school.

coogar:

stop clutching at straws. . . .
ronaldo has now scored more goals for real madrid than he did @ man utd where he spent 6 seasons.
it says a lot about the quality of la liga - the league with the most porous defence on the planet.

Lots of factors:

Better teammates

A more matured player: He joined United as a youngster.

usbcable:

@ medjai,

Abegi hope you no miss that wonderful third strike that marked RM 4000th league goal.

where is Khanye to post the video sef. (he no go show face now )

Nothing compared to Villa's hanger vs Casillas

This is getting embarrassing. 11 penalties in one season. I wonder what the record for most penalties in one season is.

Congrats Zambia. Very well deserved victory.

AjanleKoko:

Let's do it like this, guys.
Too early to talk about who will win. Let's look at the big names, and see how their big names are squaring up.
E,g Spain. Yeah, we know they are the favourites . . . but are they really? Villa is out with a broken leg and will probably suffer from match-rustiness. Torres is . . . well, Torres. It may well be that Valencia's Soldado and Bilbao's Llorente will be the men up front this term. Germany and Holland may well have their measure in this year's competition.

Of course, Villa would be a huge loss but Spain has still got loads of options up front.

VdB has experimented with a Barca-esque 4-3-3 in recent matches, notably in the match vs Scotland in the qualifiers and the friendly vs England, deploying Silva as a 'false 9' and Villa and Iniesta playing on the left and right. . . If he decides to go with this formation and play a 'false 9', they've got: Silva, Cesc, Mata, Iniesta and if he decides to play 4-2-3-1 and use a traditional CF, they've got, in Villa's absence: Llorente, who's in rich scoring vein, Soldado(will likely get called up), Negredo(been in and out of injury. Not been at his best) or he could call up one of these youngsters: Adrian Lopez, Rodrigo Moreno or Alvaro Vazquez(if he shakes off his injury), who are doing quite well or even recall Raul who has been great for Schalke so far and of course, there's Torres, though I doubt he'll get a look in. So, they're pretty much sorted up front.

One major concern for VDB would be the which combination he should go with. With Ramos having established himself as a top, top CB, will he go with Puyol - Pique or drop one of the Barca duo for Ramos and play Arbeloa at RB?

Again, I don't think Spain needs a double pivot of Busquets and Alonso because they enjoy so much possession against whoever they play against. Only one should be starting, preferably, Busquets. Iniesta should play as AM and Xavi should play CM. Just like Barca.

Since Albiol and Marchena are likely gonna be dropped. VdB should call up Isco(Malaga), Muniain(Bilbao) or Casado(Vallecano). They've been fantastic so far.

jamace:

Zambia qualified for AFCON final and the pros offered one day free service.
So, now that Zambia has won the final, it will be 7 days free browsing for the boys, abi?

Infact ehn, I'd be in Zambia for the next one month.

. . . . Off to Zambia.

Cabral

Levante 1-0

Ramseydamus. . . . Who's next?

Pep's line-ups are indeed strange this season. There are some huge changes in the team like Pep doesn't care if we lose points or not because of that, yet on the other hand Messi is always there in the team playing every single match. If you're not gonna take the league seriously then let Messi take a rest too. If you are taking the league seriously then what's up with all these changes in the line-ups?


The painful thing is there's still lots of matches to play and the league is already wrapped up.

What a goal by Tello

What an impact Maxi's having on tonight's game. One goal and one assist within 20 minutes of being introduced.

Really strange line-up for tonight's game.

Masch, Thiago and Sergi Roberto in midfield. CL on Pep's mind but should we be fielding weakeaned sides considering we are away and how poor we've been away from home in the league?


Great to see Pedrito back.

I'm tipping España to win

Congrats to Zambia.

Great win. The overall play was far better than in recent games. Now we only need to take our chances in front of goal.

So, it's a repeat of the 2009 final. The venue will likely be the Bernabeu. It'll be very sweet for us to win there.

AjanleKoko:

It's the best way to approach the game. No risks, play Masch in front of the regular back for, and for Pete's sake, push Cesc out front, rather than in the middle.
My formation:

                                      Pinto

Alves               Puyol                    Pique                        Abidal

                               Mascherano

                      Xavi                    Iniesta (or Thiago)
                                 

           Alexis                 Messi

                         
                                      Cesc

Alexis can switch plays between the left and right, but keep Cesc forward. Depending on how the game progresses, we can bring Tello on to keep the right back busy. But we need to keep it tight at the back.

Alexis will likely miss tonight's game and no way Cesc can play wide. It's best to play him as a false 9 and move Messi to the right or play him as a false 10 behind Messi so he can occupy the space Messi leaves behind when he drops deep.

----Pinto----

---Alves---Pique----Puyol----Abidal/Adriano

-----Masch-----
-----Xavi----Thiago---

----Messi----^Cesc----Tello-----

We'll play Athletic in the final if we get past Valencia.

Athletic thrashed Mirandes 6-2 and qualified 8-3 on aggregate.

Mirandes, from Segunda B, had an incredible run, knocking out three La Liga sides - Racing, Villarreal, Espanyol, amongst others en route the s/final.

It'd be interesting to see if Mirandes gets one of the European tickets since we'll definitely qualify for the CL and Athletic might pick the last CL ticket or at least an EL ticket.

Messi's sixth sense explained

Published: Tuesday 7
February 2012, 14.53CET

So acute is Lionel Messi's vision on the football pitch that he seems to have eyes in the back of his head, but is there a scientific explanation for his sixth sense, asks Champions?

Watching Lionel Messi dribbling through a defence or playing a slide-rule pass through a narrow space at an acute angle is one of the most thrilling sights in football. It is almost as
if he has a bigger picture of the game than anyone around him. Eyes in the back of his head, if you will.
Now academics in Germany and the Netherlands have decided to put this theory to the scientific test "We were interested in the underlying mechanisms of expert
performance in sport," explains Professor Norbert Hagemann from the University of Kassel.
"Footballers are active on a huge field and have to attend to, or view, so many people on the field that we believed the best player could attend to more players at the same time."
In layman's terms, the
researchers believed the best players had a broader visual span that enables them to see more of the pitch and the position of their opponents and
team-mates at any one time than less skilful players. To test this belief, they studied the behaviour of amateur footballers when they were
shown various football
situations. However, the results actually contradicted the theory.
"In general, we were not ableto find a broader visual span in skilled players," says Hagemann.
"They do not extract
information from a broader visual area. However, we found a longer fixed duration. Such skill-related differences in 'gaze strategies' are thought to be functional in terms of more efficient information pick-up."
So while the best players may not have a greater field of vision than average players,they pick up more informationfrom a single glance. This finding supports the 'chunk theory',
based on the discovery that the best chess players could remember a board, not in terms of 32 pieces, but as five or six groups of pieces.
Daniel Kahneman, the Nobel Prize-winning psychologist, hashis own take on this
phenomenon. Drawing on the experience of fire fighters whocan sense when a burning house is about to explode, hesuggests they develop something he calls 'expert intuition', an instinctive method
of solving a particular problem.
Could this describe Messi's innate ability to make the right run or play the right pass?Players who are not as gifted as Messi could be trained to improve their 'fixation duration', but Hagemann is not convinced this will directly improve their performance: "The less skilled player has to learn the structure of play, the patterns of the movements and so on.
They have to build a knowledge base that helps them discover the relevant information in the
current situation. To train less skilled players, it would be more helpful to orient their attention to the relevant features of
play. Fixation duration is a by-product of knowing where to attend."
Whether you refer to this as a knowledge base or expert intuition, this quality helps more skilful footballers predict
upcoming events much more precisely – the greater the knowledge base, typically the better the player.
"If the best footballer already knows what is going to happen then they will know where to direct their attention," says Hagemann. "Players like Messi are great at decision-making.
They have anticipation abilities that help them solve complex problems in the best possible way."
Now the team are aiming to get to the bottom of the
underlying mechanism that allows Messi to solve these
complex tasks with such consummate ease. The defenders' union will be waiting with bated breath to read their findings.

http://www.uefa.com/uefachampionsleague/news/newsid=1749111.html

dayokanu:

Bayern Munich president Uli Hoeness has revealed that his club gave Borussia Dortmund a loan when the Signal Iduna Park side was on the verge of bankruptcy.

The Ruhr area side was staring into the abyss in 2003, but rather than see their rivals go under, Hoeness decided to loan them money in order to help with its crippling debts.

"When they [Dortmund] were aware that they could no longer pay their salaries, we gave them €2 million without collateral for a few months," the 60-year-old told fans in Hamburg.

When questioned about the loan, current Borussia Dortmund CEO Hans-Joachim Watzke confirmed that the Bavarians had indeed helped his club out with their crisis.

"Yes, I can confirm a loan," he told Ruhr Nachrichten.

Bayern has in the past also given financial aid to local rivals 1860 Munich, as well as St Pauli.


http://www.goal.com/en-us/news/87/germany/2012/02/06/2889828/uli-hoeness-bayern-saved-dortmund-from-bankruptcy-with-2-million-

Really sweet of Bayern. I hope La Liga teams can learn from this, specifically, Barca and Real. They should be nice enough to agree to a fairer TV revenue sharing deal. It doesn't make sense when they are taking about 50% of the TV money and the remaining clubs are going into administration.

Stealthy:

I agree. I've seen Barca concede a number of goals that could have been prevented with a man on the line (eg the Busquests own goal vs Arsenal in Nou Camp last year). Doesn't hurt to keep men on the post. The only downside is that if those 2 men are slow to get off the goal line, the may play the opponent onside in the follow-up after the corner kick.

To Bundesliga matters:
The BL is the most exciting league in Europe this season. The only league where a winner is very difficult to predict each season - with the additional UEFA coefficients they've got, I see BL teams performing better in the UCL, provided they don't keep rotating those top spots lol.

Bayern's draw means that Dortmund are in the driving seat. With Dortmund out of Europe altogether, they can focus on the league, while Bayern tries to ensure they're in the UCL final in the Allianz (I doubt they'll make it that far, unless they're as lucky as they were in 09/10 season). And Dortmund is playing some exciting footie too, so they have my support (sorry dayokanu - I'll support Bayern in UCL until they meet Barca!)

If we had men marking the posts vs Milan at Camp Nou, Thiago Silva's goal could have been prevented. We are poor at defending corners. Good thing is that most teams don't know we are vulnerable from corners and set piece situations generally. Plus the fact that we have the ball most of the time means we hardly give away corners or freekicks.

As per whether or whether not to have men marking the posts at corners, there's no definitive answer, as in football, even though it's played by professionals who do specific training aimed towards scenarios such as corner kicks, alot of what happens in these scenarios are down to chance and possibility.

I've seen plenty of examples where the man on the post has saved the day and plenty more when the man on the post has fallen asleep and let the ball creep in when he should have stopped it. It's all down to how the team decide to set themselves up and playing to their strengths. For example, if you had 4-5 Peter Crouch height type of players to help out with defensive duties, then marking the posts would probably not be within the interests of that defending team. If you take Barca as the defending team, then it probably is or should be within the interests of defending corner kicks to atleast put one man on the back post, simply because they don't have the overall aerial presence to cover the threat of bigger opposition.

What i'm effectively trying to say is that it's unique to each team how they set up and in many cases not having a man or two on the posts can be as damaging as not using them in the man-to-man marking duties.

Tunisia's keeper sha. The guy na big mumu

^^^ And it was a really great goal. Lucho has transformed Roma into one big killing machine. They just steamroll teams at will. If only they could be more consistent. If they win their game in hand vs Catania, they'll move up to 5th place ahead of Inter.

usbcable:

hala hala hala aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa
three points is the summary
boriing match
but cool 7point lead remains
17 matches to go
\
next is levante.
we need to show em pepper.
useless idiots

Of course, with the refs solidly you, you will show Levante pepper.

Stealthy:

I prefer Fab to play in attack rather than AMF - he's been good with shots & headers and less impressive with maintaining possession.

Exactly! I've been saying this for weeks.

Considering we had only one/two starter(s) in our entire front 6 we created a lot of chances, I was impressed. Its funny that the starters are the ones that actually wasted the most chances. Its been a while since I've seen us create chances so freely in the final third, and that was despite a sloppy game in midfield. Just goes to show how the 4-3-3 is really the perfect system for us.

Really impressed by Tello's efforts tonight. I don't know if its just me but I was never able to warm to JDS.

Anyways animportant win to break the string of draws, I have a strong feeling this is the point of the season where we'll start to turn things around.

Busi's injured. . . .We're so screwed