Re: The non EPL thread

**Boxtyeater** Fri Dec 09, 2011 10:07 pm

The Puke wrote:The two best teams in Europe go head to head tomorrow night in the Bernabeu. Should be another entralling game. Looks as though Mourinho is going to sacrifice Ozil in favour of a more pragmatic midfield player like Diarra or possibly Contrao switching from their normal 4-2-3-1 t0 4-3-3. Madrid would be happy enough with a point, a win would give them an very strong lead. Barca have a few big selection choice ahead of themselves, I would expect that Villa will more than likely lose out ot Cesc would will operate in a false number 9 role with Sanchez and Messi up top with him.

I for one can't wait

If it was below in Aughawillian, I'd stop in Priors in the town...Not a sport.

**Parouisa** Sat Dec 10, 2011 12:38 am

Home game so he should not concede psychologically by going 'conventional' 4-3-3 . Go with the normal and see how it plays I say.

**The Puke** Sat Dec 10, 2011 2:21 pm

Putting the Pep in the step of Barcelona
By Richard Fitzpatrick

Saturday, December 10, 2011

PEP GUARDIOLA is an intellectual. He has mates in football. He is godfather, for example, to one of Luís Figo’s daughters.

Many of his best friends, however, are novelists. He is bookish. This leaves him open to lampooning in the laddish world of football.

There is a satirical show on Catalan TV called Crackòvia. In it, he is often depicted wandering into Barcelona’s team dressing room immersed in a book of poetry, the sight of which sends his players scampering for cover.

"Everything is for doing and everything is possible," he says sanctimoniously, reciting the words of a famous Catalan poem.

The traces of Guardiola’s personality that seep out occasionally suggest he is not completely dry. When a Madrid newspaper dispatched a journalist to ask him if he pissed perfume, he thought for a second and then replied deadpan: "Maybe they are right; maybe I do piss perfume."

Like many of the players schooled at La Masia, Barcelona’s famous soccer academy, Guardiola tries to be humble. When Gerard Piqué and Víctor Valdés rose their hands to fans with fingers outstretched — one for every goal scored — after last season’s 5-0 filleting of Real Madrid, they were quickly censured by Carles Puyol. Their team captain gestured frantically with his eyes towards the stand. Guardiola had sent out a message — he didn’t want any gloating.

How much has changed in a year. 12 months later, almost to the day, Real Madrid briefly pulled six points ahead of Barcelona in La Liga (since reduced to three points with a game in hand). Until a couple of weeks ago, two points was the most Guardiola trailed Real Madrid since becoming Barça manager three and a half seasons ago.

The teams play each other tonight at the Bernabéu. José Mourinho’s team is in imperious form. Barcelona are playing well, too. Their record at home reads 39-0.

Yet the Catalan press are anxious. Barça lost points on the road — 11 after 15 games. Last season, they only dropped 18 in total, four of which were squandered after they secured the title.

In a two-horse league, a kind of "Scotland in the sun", they can ill afford to drop many more points. A loss in the Clásico could put the kibosh on their season. It represents Guardiola’s sternest test since taking charge.

Part of the problem is that he has set the bar so high. In his first season in charge, he won six trophies, including the Champions League, which made him the tournament’s youngest winning manager. Last May, of course, in obliterating Manchester United 3-1 at Wembley, he added a second title.

Commentators have breathlessly installed Guardiola’s Barcelona team on the same hall of fame as football’s great sides, alongside Di Stéfano’s Real Madrid, Cruyff’s Ajax and the Milan of Van Basten. Their pinball, possession brand of football is a marvel to watch.

He drives himself relentlessly. His assistants complain he doesn’t eat enough. When asked by a journalist last season if he wouldn’t enjoy the greater control that managers have in club football in Britain, he blurted: "But I don’t want more responsibility! I’ve already lost my hair and got a bad back."

He is a strict disciplinarian. He once fined Leo Messi for being a minute late for training, and, of course, he had the cojones to remove troublesome characters from Barcelona’s ranks, including Ronaldinho, Deco, Samuel Eto’o and, most notably, Zlatan Ibrahimovic, who, according to the Swede’s autobiography, once threatened to beat up the Catalan chief in public.

Xavi, his midfield general, reckons he’s an obsessive. "He keeps going until he gets it right, no matter what he’s doing" he said recently.

"If Pep Guardiola decided to be a musician, he would be a good musician. If he wanted to be a psychologist, he would be a good psychologist."

For Guardiola, the perfectionist, little things haven’t been perfect this season. The squad has been wracked by injury, 17 in total in less than four months, which could be down to the inexorable aggrandisement of FC Barcelona. Before the first team used to do pre-season training, he has complained; now they just do pre-season tours.

He is missing Pedro’s fast, unpredictable darts from the wing in particular. His captain and force of nature, Puyol, has started only a third of the team’s league games this season. Last weekend, he withdrew after 35 minutes. It will be a bad omen, if nothing else, if he doesn’t feature against Real; remarkably, he has missed every one of Barcelona’s last seven losses.

The endless tinkering Guardiola is prone to, including a three-man defence, hasn’t always worked. The team is over-reliant on Messi. The Argentinian has popped 17 league goals already this season, but significantly he hasn’t scored away, and it is on the road where Guardiola’s men have been frail.

Guardiola works on rolling one-year contracts. He has constantly stressed how stressful it is manning the tiller at Barcelona. He says that it’s important to know when to go, that players get tired of hearing the same patter from a coach, and that the coach, too, tires of players.

This season may well be his last at Barcelona. He has left the club before — as a player, who won six La Liga titles and a European Cup, he walked away in 2001, still in his prime. He speaks good English. He is coveted in Italy, above all leagues, where he played for a few years at the end of his career. How great a manager is Guardiola? He is working with a prodigious collection of players in his own backyard. How would he fare elsewhere? "I’d like to see him try," scoffs Mourinho.

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**Loyal2TheRoyal** Sat Dec 10, 2011 5:35 pm

Real Madrid for the win.

**Grenvile** Sat Dec 10, 2011 8:35 pm

Barca at 17/10 for this? Looks like an absolute gift..

**Loyal2TheRoyal** Sat Dec 10, 2011 8:36 pm

Read the article JS.

They over-reliant on Messi.

**Grenvile** Sat Dec 10, 2011 9:28 pm

Valdes having an absolute shocker, causing a goal within 26 seconds. Should be 2-0. Ronaldo through on goal, could easily have scored, should have passed to an unmarked Di-Maria and misses completely..

**Parouisa** Sat Dec 10, 2011 10:46 pm

Barca abu

**The Puke** Sat Dec 10, 2011 11:08 pm

I think L2TR would be as well off to stop posting about football, he has been badly found out over the last week or so.

Last week he proclaimed this Real Madrid side the greatest of all time Laughing

Whatever little credability he had on the subject has now been eroded.

Yet again Barca show that class beats workrate

**Loyal2TheRoyal** Sat Dec 10, 2011 11:18 pm

I predicted Barca would win on the stroke of half-time when the referee refused to send off Messi for a second bookable offence.

**The Puke** Sat Dec 10, 2011 11:21 pm

Loyal2TheRoyal wrote:I predicted Barca would win on the stroke of half-time when the referee refused to send off Messi for a second bookable offence.

Oh dear!

What was the bookable offence by the way, every foul isn't a yellow card. Hence why both Diarra and Pepe weren't booked for worse tackles. Messi attempted a tackle his foot was planted and there was no malice. If you could show me where it states in the rule book that it is a bookable offence?

**Loyal2TheRoyal** Sat Dec 10, 2011 11:23 pm

The Puke wrote:
Loyal2TheRoyal wrote:I predicted Barca would win on the stroke of half-time when the referee refused to send off Messi for a second bookable offence.

Oh dear!

What was the bookable offence by the way, every foul isn't a yellow card. Hence why both Diarra and Pepe weren't booked for worse tackles. Messi attempted a tackle his foot was planted and there was no malice. If you could show me where it states in the rule book that it is a bookable offence?

It was a yellow card offence Puke.

**The Puke** Sat Dec 10, 2011 11:24 pm

Loyal2TheRoyal wrote:
The Puke wrote:
Loyal2TheRoyal wrote:I predicted Barca would win on the stroke of half-time when the referee refused to send off Messi for a second bookable offence.

Oh dear!

What was the bookable offence by the way, every foul isn't a yellow card. Hence why both Diarra and Pepe weren't booked for worse tackles. Messi attempted a tackle his foot was planted and there was no malice. If you could show me where it states in the rule book that it is a bookable offence?

It was a yellow card offence Puke.

In what way

**The Puke** Mon Dec 12, 2011 10:05 am

Jonathon Wilson's analysis of the game

There are still those, remarkably, who ask whether tactics really matter, still those who persist with the Luddite insistence that the best players will win out come what may. No matter that Lionel Messi never produces his Barcelona form for Argentina or that Dani Alves regularly flounders for Brazil, Barcelona, these flat-earthers keep saying, win because they have the best players.
What happened in the Bernabeu on Saturday, surely, will disabuse them. Good players are important, of course, but this was a game turned on a tactical shift, a game Barcelona won because Pep Guardiola came up with a formation to which Jose Mourinho could not find an answer.
For the first quarter of the game, Barca was rattled. Real Madrid, slightly surprisingly starting not with a 4-3-3 but with a 4-2-3-1, pressed hard and fast, often an effective line of five bearing down on the man in possession, with just Lassana Diarra (used as a midfield anchor and not, as many had expected, as a right back, where Fabio Coentrao fought an increasingly vain battle to stop Andres Iniesta) left to support the back four.
It was the speed of that pressing, allied to an ill-conceived and ill-executed pass from Victor Valdes and some doziness from Gerard Pique, that led to Real Madrid's opener, and it also prevented Barca developing anything like its usual fluency or rhythm early on. Barca's system was a little odd, resembling less the familiar 4-3-3 with a false nine than a 4-4-1-1 or perhaps a 4-3-2-1. Alexis Sanchez, beginning to the left, worked across the forward line, with Lionel Messi less a false nine than an orthodox 10, tucked behind him. Cesc Fabregas had what was presumably intended as a free role, but he often seemed too advanced, denying Xavi and Iniesta the simple short passing options on which they thrive.
In those opening stages, Real looked dominant and, frankly, it seemed the title was already won, that it was time to invoke the Three-Year Rule of the great Hungarian coach Bela Guttmann and point out how rarely even the very best sides, and particularly those based on intense pressing, sustain their success into a fourth season.
But midway through the half, Guardiola made the tactical switch that turned the game and, perhaps, the season. Dani Alves was pushed forward into an attacking right-sided midfield role, with Carles Puyol moving over to right back, a more naturally defensive presence to stifle Cristiano Ronaldo, who was further neutered by the way Alves was able to prevent Marcelo getting forward to support him. Ronaldo's contribution, while not overly significant early on, dwindled to zero after that, one badly misplaced header and a couple of unsuccessful free-kicks his only notably involvement in the second half. By the end, Mourinho had shifted him to the right, away from the attentions of Puyol, but by then the game was lost.
That meant Sergio Busquets dropping into the back four, although he continued to step out into midfield. In turn, Xavi and Fabregas fell deeper, with Iniesta going wider to the left, Messi floating in a trequartista position, and Sanchez becoming the central forward. It was the triangular interchange of Alves, so much better as an attacking wide man who makes the odd tackle than as an orthodox fullback, Sanchez and Messi that proved key in an attacking sense.
That was seen most obviously with the third goal, a superb break begun when Pique won possession and fed Iniesta, who darted through two challenges before giving the ball to Messi. He laid it on for Alves, whose cross was perfect for Fabregas, arriving late, to score with a diving header.
The equalizer came from Messi dropping deep away from any markers, picking up possession and surging forward to tee up Sanchez. In the Super Cup, Mourinho had used Ricardo Carvalho to track the Argentine, but the fact he was not a false nine here and had Sanchez ahead of him meant the two center backs had to stay in place. Perhaps if Mourinho had used three holding midfielders, one of them could have tracked Messi, but he opted for the extra creator in Mesut Ozil who could facilitate the high press -- and for 20 minutes or so, he seemed to have got it right.
Just as important as the Messi-Alves-Sanchez triangle was the battle between Ozil and Busquets. Dropping in to the back four gave Busquets more time and space and allowed him to initiate moves in the way he usually does, away from the intentions of Ozil. Leaving the opposing playmaker free is a gamble, of course, but it worked here, not least because Ozil is not a particularly quick distributor, almost an old-fashioned No. 10 who takes a second or two to weigh up his options. Often that ability to create calm -- what Argentines revere as "la pausa" -- in the hurly-burly of a game is an asset; here it gave Barca breathing space, and Busquets was able to step out and close Ozil down.
This, perhaps, is the ultimate result of Guardiola's use of a back three this season: on Saturday, he played with a back three-and-a-half, with Busquets operating partly as a center back and partly as a holding midfielder, to an extent doing what fullbacks have been doing for years, and using the space afforded defenders in an attacking sense. That development was logical and could be foreseen.
What is startling, though, is the juxtaposition of Busquets' role with the events of Thursday evening, when two sides -- Universidad de Chile in winning the first leg of its Copa Sudamericana final away to Liga de Quito and Rwanda in its Cecafa Cup semifinal win over Sudan -- used a 3-1-4-2. There is, it might be added, a common source in that Guardiola and Universidad de Chile's coach Jorge Sampaoli, are both devotees of Marcelo Bielsa.
Perhaps that is the future, revealed on three continents in the space of 48 hours. More prosaically, Saturday was about Barca reasserting itself, about showing it has not gone stale. Guttmann always insisted that after three years at a club either the manager or the players had to be got rid of to prevent staleness and complacency. Guardiola has tinkered with personnel, but more crucially, his side is still evolving tactically, and that gives him options like the one he invoked on Saturday.

**Boxtyeater** Mon Dec 12, 2011 9:12 pm

This "report" has had a similar effect on me to the late Canon McGivney's sermons of the last century. The non EPL thread - Page 9 Sleep-10

**Boxtyeater** Thu Dec 22, 2011 11:54 pm

Puke is a gas man, espousing this carry on...It looks more like a Quilty V KIB clash...

**The Puke** Fri Dec 23, 2011 11:31 am

What are you on about, the keeper acted the thug and was correctly sent off

**The Puke** Thu Dec 29, 2011 7:51 pm

Great win for Irish football last night.

Fair play to Celtic and Neil Lennon for turning things around.

Proud Fenians, one and all

**Boxtyeater** Thu Dec 29, 2011 8:18 pm

No interest....next.

**The Puke** Wed Jan 18, 2012 11:04 pm

Yet another deserved win for Barca over Real Madird tonight, yet another one goal lead spurned by Madrid. Only one win in 9 for Mourinho over Barca since he arrived at Madrid and that was an extra time winner in the cup final last year. 5 wins out of 9 by my count for Pep.

**Thomas Clarke** Thu Jan 19, 2012 9:00 am

The Puke wrote:Yet another deserved win for Barca over Real Madird tonight, yet another one goal lead spurned by Madrid. Only one win in 9 for Mourinho over Barca since he arrived at Madrid and that was an extra time winner in the cup final last year. 5 wins out of 9 by my count for Pep.

Facts are all well and good, Puke, but I've no doubt that Loyal will introduce us to another angle that portrays Madrid as the side that have really been exerting recent dominance in this great rivalry!

**The Puke** Thu Jan 19, 2012 9:10 am

Thomas Clarke wrote:
The Puke wrote:Yet another deserved win for Barca over Real Madird tonight, yet another one goal lead spurned by Madrid. Only one win in 9 for Mourinho over Barca since he arrived at Madrid and that was an extra time winner in the cup final last year. 5 wins out of 9 by my count for Pep.

Facts are all well and good, Puke, but I've no doubt that Loyal will introduce us to another angle that portrays Madrid as the side that have really been exerting recent dominance in this great rivalry!

Leave him off, I must say I have been disappointed with Real in the Classico's, they have been excellent and ultra consistent in the league since he joined playing decent attacking football but since they got hammered 5-0 in the first meeting between the sides where he played an attacking line up he has been very negative in these games.

The second half last night they were reduced to just pumping long balls forward and hacking Barca to pieces, both Carvalho and Pepe were lucky to remain on the pitch. Barca's away form in the league has been patchy enough and this is down to the fact that when they have gone away to the likes of Valencia, Althletico Bilbao and Espanyol that all three teams have had a go and at least tried to get bodies into Barca half of the field and retain possesion, AC Milan also put it up to them in group stages of the Champions league doing the same thing. It can be risky given that Barca like to press very high up the field but you aren't going to beat them by just looking to knocking long balls into the corner for Ronaldo/Benzema to chase. If you don't try and use the ball more meaningfully against Barca they will come at you in waves and as we have seen the pressure will eventually lead to goals. It is very disappointing to see a very good deep lying playmaker like Xabi Alonso reduced to nothing more than a poor mans Glenn Whelan in these games.

But as long as Madrid keep setting up in this manner Barca will continue to dominate these games

**The Puke** Thu Jan 19, 2012 9:55 am

Good breakdown of last nights match here

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**Thomas Clarke** Thu Jan 19, 2012 10:14 am

The Puke wrote:Good breakdown of last nights match here

[You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]

An excellent website - the best soccer website around.

I spoke to RMD 18 months ago about being able to use similar diagrams here on HS to illustrate what we mean when discussing gaelic football & hurling , but the technology wasn't around. Something similar would be a great addition to the site, and set us apart from every other GAA website.

Perhaps GF could work some magic on this?

**Podger** Thu Jan 19, 2012 1:59 pm

JEsus. must get meself an anorak.

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