A Weekend To Remember
It turned out to be an extraordinary weekend for Football Club Barcelona. Not only did we take a giant step towards retaining La Liga in football, but our basketball team, Regal Barça, also won the Euroliga – the equivalent of football’s Champions League – by beating Olympiakos 86-68 in Paris. It was fantastic to see the triumph but it was also great to see Xavi, Busquets, Bojan, Piqué and Puyol cheering on the team from the sidelines. It just goes to show what a family atmosphere there is at the club at the moment. Having won the Copa del Rey earlier in the season the basketball team just need to win the league to complete a triple to follow on from our football team’s success in 2008/2009.
In Madrid the media is still trying to undermine our achievements in La Liga. Marca’s front page yesterday read "A push towards the title" with a photo of Gerard Piqué’s push on Kanoute in the 75th minute of Saturday’s game at Sevilla. I don’t doubt that there was a slight push from Piqué but Kanoute made such a meal of it by throwing himself to the floor I’m not surprised the ref didn’t award a penalty. Marca of course make no mention of the penalty not given on Pedro in the 64th minute neither do they say that the ref ignored a clear second yellow card for Luis Fabiano. Of course some decisions will go in our favour but Marca’s complete bias against us says very little for their journalistic credibility. If Marca would like to argue about refereeing decisions here are some statistics for them. This season Real Madrid have been penalized for 558 fouls and they have received 87 yellow cards (one yellow card for every 6.414 fouls), meanwhile Barça have received 77 yellow cards for committing 494 fouls which makes an everage of one for every 6.416 fouls. As you can see the yellow card/foul ratio is practically the same which is how it should be, however, if we add that Barça have been given 8 red cards (one for every 61.75 fouls) while Madrid have only had five players sent off (one for every 111.6 fouls) we can see that in this aspect Madrid have had by far the more favourable decisions. If that wasn’t enough Madrid have been awarded 8 penalties this season while Barça, despite our non-stop attacking game, have only received 3. I really don’t like to make anything of referee’s decisions as I prefer to believe in their integrity (however difficult that can sometimes be). I also haven’t forgot the week that Kameni and Albiol were both pardoned when they should have been suspended, and I could also ask the question of why Barça have to play more often at 10pm than occurs with Real Madrid.
Finally, I should mention that the kick off times have been set for next weekend’s games. Barça will play Valladolid at 7pm on Sunday while Malaga face Madrid at the same time. For the game against Valladolid we will be without the suspended Xavi and Maxwell (who is also injured and will need three weeks to recover). There is a problem for Guardiola as he will have to decide whether he likes the balance of a Toure-Busquets-Keita midfield which would lack a playmaker, or whether to risk a youngster such as Johnathan dos Santos or Thiago Alcantara for such an important game. Personally I’d go with experience though our forwards won’t receive the normal quality of passes.
The one thing we will have to avoid on Sunday is fear of failure. We need to be confident of our ability and Guardiola would do well to tell the players to go out and show us all what a great team they are. It would be nice to follow Chelsea’s example this weekend when in a similar situation needing to win at home against a weaker team to clinch the title, they put on a show and won 8-0!
