₦airaland Forum

Busi's injury looks serious

. . . . And Madridistas will complain about how Barca gets favoured by refs.

Pepe handles the ball in the box, penalty not given. Madrid are robbing their way to the title.

medjai:
I'd really love to see a Tello - Messi - Cuenca combo up front. Looks a very exciting combo.

And it looks like I got my wish. This looks like our best attacking combination with all the injuries and Sanchez's inconsistency. I expect alot of goals tonight.
JDS to start and Busi's on the bench.

Xavi not in the starting line up for the 2nd straight match.

Ramos 1-0

I'd really love to see a Tello - Messi - Cuenca combo up front. Looks a very exciting combo.

usbcable:
Nairaland World
Plot 1 Galacticos Avenue
Lagos
Dear God,

Please kindly make it be that Real Madrid drop points again today and make Barcelona win its match against Sociedad.
Amin.

Yours faithfully
USBCABLE.

Fixed. . . . Amen!

C'mon Getafe

^^^I'm very sure that prayer has backfired.

We've drawn our last 3. Well, someone's has got to pay for the broken plates.

interesting. . .

I think it depends on the team you're playing against.

Against Barcelona, for instance, it doesn't make any sense having men marking the post because Barca hardly poses any threat from corner kicks and set-plays generally(yeah, they might score one or two). Infact, they themself know this. That's why they choose to pass their corner kicks most times.

But playing against a team like Stoke, Blackburn, Bilbao or Madrid - teams that pose a huge aerial threat, you've just gotta have men marking the post. Effective marking doesn't guarantee a 100% success rate. It's always 50/50. And even if your defenders do well to prevent the first ball, what of the 2nd ball? They could get a shot on target from that and having men marking the post could prevent that from going in.

Moodie:
, yet you call Christiano Ronaldo, ''Penaldo''!!!, as if scoring a penalty is easy. Now we have another area where CR7 is better than Messi.

Diego Alves is very good at saving spot kicks. He has saved 11 of the 19 he has encountered in La Liga. He even saved from 'Penaldo'

usbcable:
later on the ballon d'or and his PA will accuse referees of bias.
that was a red card offence
well aint suprised can uefa give its ownself a red card.
tsheeew

You sef dey complain? SMBFH

Higuain's handball in the dying minutes at the Mestalla that would have resulted in a Valencia penalty was never given. The invisible offside that was called when Mallorca would have gone 2-0 up. The many penalties you won from dive Maria's dives, etc, etc.

Good game. We got an away goal.
Pinto and his useless brainfarts, he could have been sent off.

I don't know what's up with Alexis. He's just too inconsistent. One good game and he is below par the next three or four games. He had a stinker last night.

The league is most definitely lost. No jazz on earth could make us win the league.

Pep got his tactics wrong in this one. How are you going to score with 7 defensive players, a deep lying central midfielder and a goal keeper on the pitch? What was the point of Adriano upfront? He's a good crosser but we never have bodies in the box with Messi dropping deep (and not being the tallest around). A genuine forward player like Tello caused the most problems for Villarreal in the whole match, despite only being on for 15 minutes. Pep talks a lot about "being bold", but that lineup wasn't bold at all. Cuenca and Tello upfront + Thiago instead of Mascherano in midfield would have been bold.

Same shit, different day. It's like they just don't care. They wait until the 75th minute until they finally start to push the tempo and it's already too late by then because the opposition starts to waste time.

Cesc! OMG

Damn! We need to score

@ stealthy,
Pedro's injured.

Barca are a mess

ht 1-1

And here's what Cesc himself has to say:

"I'm not happy with my own performance, I have to improve a lot.
"This the boss's system and it's not easy to get it straight away. When I play further forward, I have more mobility and that's a role I can handle – further back I need to have more discipline and I'm missing the patience for that”

Plantain Boy - Timaya

Best game so far

Johnpaul88:
I like Iniesta a lot and his contributions to barca's style of play. But i do not know why a clué will downplay the contributions of Cesc on the alter of not holding ball under pressure, misplacing passes etc ignoring that this same Cesc has racked up 14 goals and 12 assists including important goals compared to Iniesta's 4 goals and 5 assists. This is what wins u matches not only short passes. Iniesta's injury this season have exercabated also. If not for Cesc helping Messi in scoring, i wonder what would have become of us this season.

I'm not criticising Cesc. I was all out for us signing him and I think he has been one of our best players this season.

However, there are some flaws as regards his midfield/possession game.

With 87% pass success %, he has the lowest PS% amongst our midfielders. It's a good statistic in general terms if he played for any other team. Take Arsenal for example. Their team average pass succession rate is 84.5 %. In Arsenal he would be clearly above average with his possession game. But he's not playing for any other team. He's playing as a Barcelona midfielder where possession and keeping the ball has the highest priority. Our game's built around that. Barcelona's average pass completion rate is 89.4 %. A Barcelona midfielder is not supposed to have possession game numbers clearly below team average. There are 8 Barcelona players who are better than him in keeping possession, including every other of our midfielders.

Now this statistic doesn't tell anything about the overall quality of a player, before someone gets me wrong. We're just talking about the aspect of his possession game.

His directness can be used to break parked buses. He was fantastic at the Bernabeu. But at the Nou Camp two days ago, he just looked lost in the middle with all the pressure from Real Madrid. Pep took him off only 2 minutes after Real Madrid scored their first goal and were all over us. Now I'll ask this: Would Pep take off one of his players doing well when Real Madrid just look like coming back into the game and replace him by a 20 year old? Not even a tactical sub, but a CM vs CM substitution? He wouldn't. He obviously put Thiago in to stabilise the midfield because he believed Thiago would do better than Fabregas did. Tells you the story when Pep, when shyte hits the fan, replaces someone who played 8 years of first division football at the highest level by a kid who played in the Segunda last season, because the opponent is all over us.

He's young and will learn and adapt though. He's too good not to.

ritchboy:
If you think Iniesta is a better passer of the ball than Cesc, you need to see a DENTIST!

There's a reason Cesc is world football's undisputed assist king with 18 - 22 assists every season while Iniesta struggles to cop 4 or 5

Yes Cesc is more productive but he isn't a better passer or player than Iniesta.
Of course, Cesc's gonna have racks on racks on racks of assits playing at Arsenal. Everything went through him. Corners, freekicks, everything was Cesc. Iniesta may not cop that much assits or goals but he's damn good. The best AM in the world. His contributions are beyond what stats can show. And as per stats, he had the most assits in the CL last season.

Mcleo007:
@Medjai, no single system last forever which is why Pep is working at various playing patterns for the team. I trust his genius and judgement and believe u should as well. We are Culeans and self-belief has been our front push. With time, we will get it right. Keeping faith wit the old system wull land us in deep s hit. We were okay to have gone invincible the last two seasons. And do u know how managers keep sleepless nights looking for antidote to break that formation? And off from the blues Pep came up with the preseason formations of 3-4-3 and 3-5-2 with us easily switching to other formations as the game drives on. That is Pep's bit of brilliance.

I understand but it ain't broke, so I wonder why Pep's trying to fix it.

ritchboy:
So to sum up, Cesc ruined the game for Barca?

No he didn't but he didn't do anything significant.

But this your analysis is fuzzy. . . In the same breath you say Iniesta played wide and Cesc couldn't replicate his quality in AM(which is funny cos i coulda sworn Cesc is by and far the best AM in our solar system), maybe he switched roles during the game?

Iniesta played wide and Cesc played as AM. Normally, that would be Iniesta's position - AM. So in order to accomodate Cesc in midfield, Iniesta was played out wide and Sanchez, as CF.

If Pep's insisting on starting Cesc then the position that best utilizes him without disrupting the team would be CF.

However, my ideal front six would be this:

Alexis/Villa -- Messi -- Pedro/Cuenca
----------Iniesta--------------------
------Xavi---------------------------
------------Busi--------------------

Fabregas would make a great impact sub for Iniesta or Xavi. He would also start some games in between to rest those two. The big difference between when he completely replaces Iniesta in the lineup and when he displaces Iniesta's while playing [b]alongside [/b]him, is that in the former case he doesn't force anyone else out of position. That same formation above with Cesc in for Andres while is a step down, still maintains the effective looking frontline. However when he simply starts [I]alongside[/I] Iniesta(as the case last night), the latter is forced out to the wing which in turn forces Alexis into CF causing the other wing to disappear totally, leaving our frontline looking a lot less effective.

Unfortunately we're currently adjusting the system to fit the players, when it should be the other way around.

Fabregas has been brilliant this season in the final third. He's thrived there but as a midfielder in deeper positions, he's had challanges playing the Barca possession game. He often looks to play very direct passes. At times that works well. At other times though it leads to careless giveaways and even more importantly – slows ball circulation.

Cesc seems to be looking to pick out the most direct pass rather than the most fluid one touch pass and this slows down how fast he moves the ball. He doesnt "dwell" on the ball. It's just different from how Xavi, Iniesta, Busquets and Thiago circulate the ball.  In a game like last night's, what we needed in midfield – especially to protect the two goal lead – we needed more composure in midfield rather than forcing direct play to take advantage of space behind the Madrid line.

P.S. I could have also sworn Cesc has better range in his passing than "Don", lol

Cesc, a better passer than Iniesta? You must be friends with Pele. He and only he is capable of such codswallop.

This leg we were extremely lucky to go through, Madrid should've put this game to bed early.
However its not the defensive lapses in the first few minutes I am worried about, that's kinda been our thing for a while now. Once again the issue is how we shape up in attack.
We have no form, its as if the attacking players are just passing it around until they see an opening, there is no solid structure, and rarely any penetration from the wing.

I already explained why Fabregas' forced inclusion in the midfield has disturbed the whole rhythm of the frontline, and I feel today Illustrated that even more.

Once again Iniesta was forced to play wide, where he looked half as effective at best even in the short time he played. Fabregas is an excellent player, but while passing is great, its not at Iniesta/Xavi's level or most importantly, not nearly as consistent. If he was starting in any other midfield in the world he would've looked awesome, but when you displace someone like the Don you're always going to look underwhelming. Again we barely saw any penetration from midfield except from Messi, which was of course because Fabregas isn't that kind of player, its not really his fault though. Again Sanchez was forced to a CF role where he was really wasted, Alexis should be starting out wide period! Once Pedro came on we somewhat looked a bit like our old selves in attack with a true winger, but the drop in quality between Iniesta and Fabs in that AM role coupled with Sanchez's postion was apparent.

If Pep is insisting on starting Cesc than the position that best utilizes him without disrupting the team would be CF.


Messi bailed us out for the first goal, and it took a wonder strike to get the second. We are seeing less and less goals that were the end of our frontline's interplay like we used to see so often.

Until we revert back to the system that has been working magic the past couple of years, we will continue seeing more and more of this sort of attacking performance.

Enough rambling,

Its been a minute since I've been this nervous in a Clasico, those last 20 minutes - goodness!

I hope we don't get to meet in the CL. These classico games aren't very good for the health.

Don's been pretty unlucky with injuries so far this season. This is like his fifth injury this season. Tore his hamstring it seems.

wetin dey happen na? They could have easily handed us a manita since. Thank God for Agent Pipita

Johnpaul88:
i saw this line of argument a lot in totatbarca and i don't really want to believe it, rather i will like to believe that messi may have finally picked his away form. If u may still want to advance this argument, then u may like to wonder why the same messi- and of course fabregas playing upfront- has scored 18 times at home.

17 times at home actually. It wasn't just the goals, it's his overall performance. The third goal for instance, the way he ghosted past Mathijsen and made a mess of the entire Malaga defence, that was classic Messi and we haven't seen alot of that this season.

Angola are the best team I've seen so far.

otumfour:
all this crap talk, u would have said the same thing if Ghana had lost so wtf nugga , u are the same people who teased abt how Ghana could only vscore single goals in a match, yet we got to the quarter finals of the world cup kommot for road make we breath nugga

clash said it best ---->>>

The Black Stars are total assclowns. No wonder they haven't won anything in the past 30+ years.

kabna:
what poor game did you notice the pace of the game especially in the first half, read proper expert opinions.

What expert opinions? Ghana could hardly string two to three passes together. Their only goal came from a corner. The goal itself was a result of the goalkeeper's gaffe and some poor defending rather than some outstanding Ghana play. They hardly created any clear cut chances.

The two times Botswana attacked, they caused Ghana problems. One was a clearance off the line by John Boye and the other was John Mensah's red card.

Andre Ayew was very very poor. He had a stinker. His crosses were poo. He couldn't deliver even one clever final ball. Only Gyan impressed. He worked and stretched the Botswana defence despite not getting quality support from his teammates.

I can't believe Ghana are one of the hot favourites to win this cup. They definitely didn't play like favourites.