Sunday 28 March 2010

Bham Disaster: Barcelona Nightmare.

Wow, just when it looked like we had grown some balls and become smarter, we throw 2 points away, and the championship too. Make no bones about it, with only 6 games to go and the team 4 points behind and with an inferior goal difference, we had no business giving away 2 points.


The team never played the football required to win this game, Wenger had a very questionable team sheet omitting Arshavin, Eboué and Nasri, and starting Walcott instead. Diaby had a good game, although for all his tricks and moves, he never opened up Bham as much as he should have. Fabregas sucked after getting injured, and a note to Wenger, if players are injured, replace them, Nasri could do his job too. Walcott was awful again, Bendtner never looked like making the difference, Rosicky was intelligent but the others around him were not. At the back, Sol has no legs but has lots of personality, Song was steady, Clichy and Sagna gave their usual clinic in how not to cross the ball, seriously, what do they do in training?


Nasri opened the scoring with a nice drive, however he also missed two chances, one he tried to feed Arshavin when one on one, you need to be selfish in such regions. Arshavin sucked as well. This guy is lazy, he picks and chooses when he wants to play, and some say he is a potential Ballon d'Or winner? Ronaldo even when injured puts a solid shift in, Arshavin got 25mins and never did a tenth of the work Rosicky did. At this rate, we need players to replace him in the summer, seeing as he likes talking about new players all the time.


Almunia also sucked, this guy is so lucky to have a boss that thinks he is a real keeper. He can't kick or pass, one time he passed to a Bham player under no pressure. He fumbled a freekick, allowed one shot to hit the post, and saved the best till last with an early Easter present to Bham and Utd-Chelski by palming the ball into his own net, in the last 30 seconds of the game. My declarations, he should be dropped and shipped off when the team is mathematically out of the title race and told to find a new club, each performance sees his value drop. How many more mistakes should the other 10 players have to deal with? 97mins work undone by his antics.


Barcelona


Finally, Wenger will get what he has always wanted, a team that plays all out football, to really judge his side? I can tell all fans what to expect, we will be brushed aside by Barcelona because Wenger will not be smart, he will not change his tactics, he will not want to do all required to win. Already he has come out saying we will not man mark Messi. Is he nuts? Fergie never man marked him in the final, and look what he did to them, he killed them. I bet if Fergie played them again, he'd put Fletcher on Messi for 90mins, it is worth it man marking. He needs to also look at last years semi-final vs Utd, we never changed and we got dismantled. Infact, look at the big games this year, Utd and Chelski knew what we would do and they simply went around us.


Some think that Barcelona are just all out football, but even Guardiola knows 2 games are not the same, and he changes from time to time, even captain Puyol admits this saying, “Our rivals have studied us a lot and we have to look for alternatives,” so we also need to be pragmatic. Some see it as a gift that Iniesta is out for the first leg, but they have many players who can come in to replace him, Keita Seydou-Busquetsa-Toure Yaya and even deploy Messi in midfield, so it is still very very tough.


Some say their defence is weak, but they know how to defend, they have let in only 4 goals in 8 games, we have let in 7 goals. They have scored 12 goals, we have hit 18, but they had a tougher group than us. However they have their full defence to call up upon apart from Abidal, we are down to the bare bones. They have Valdes who is supposed to be the weak link, but he always seems to win them the big games, we saw that in the 2006 and 2009 Finals where he saved his team, can Almunia do that for us? He has consistently shown he does not have the capacity for it.


If we play our 4-3-3 and then our timid 4-5-1 in the Cam Nou, Wenger is to blame for our impending elimination, we all know it is coming as we have seen it many times before.

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