A few points that try to avoid discussion of whether Rino Gattuso should be strung up from a lamp post
1. Lightning strikes twice...
It was remarkable how similar the pattern of Wednesday night’s game at the Emirates was to the one that took place in the Quarter Finals 12 months earlier. Perhaps the sheer bucket load of chances that Barcelona created last year wasn’t as evident but the blatant superiority was. Moving the ball at speed and suffocating pressure, all very similar to what we witnessed last time out. On top of that, Barca even had a goal, from the clinical David Villa.
What took place in the second half followed the similar pattern of last year to; the reigning Spanish champions take their foot off the gas and relax, becoming complacent in their ascendency and then conceding an equaliser...only that’s when things changed...
2. ...or does it?
See, the 2011 edition saw Barcelona not just going back having drawn, it sees them returning to Spain with a deficit to claw back and the knowledge that they face an Arsenal side who look like they have matured and improved from last year’s model.
We’ve been told for years that Arsene Wenger’s team of young players are improving and taking greater strides towards winning trophies (mainly by Aresene Wenger) but seen very little evidence for it. It’s not been that the players haven’t been getting better (or bigger, stronger etc.) and developing in that sense, it’s that they seemed to be making the same mistakes and failing to learn from them.
Yes, they are still very vulnerable at the back to high balls and yes the centre backs and goalkeeper, to me, are still a problem, but outside of a crazy 45 minutes at St. James’ Park they appear mentally stronger, more able to roll with the punches and grind out a result. As much as Barca took their foot off the accelerator and got careless, the Gunners forced and harried errors in the second half and were rewarded for digging in and showing mental resilience. The tie is still finely in the balance but they should go to Spain in two weeks in great heart.
3. Englishmen go for longer
It was striking in both the Tottenham and Arsenal games that the goals for the English sides came late on. Is this is an indication of greater fitness from English teams? No, nor given the global nature of the 21st century game is it easy to make generalisations as so many different nationalities play in leagues all over the world. What it does perhaps indicate is the tempo and intensity in the English game means that teams from this side of the English Channel very rarely relent in their energy levels – they usually can’t afford to.
It’s not to say teams on the continent don’t try i their domestic games late on if a game might be beyond them, but I think there is definitely something to say for the fact that every minute in the Premier League is played at such a ferociously competitive pace (which can also be a bad thing sometimes let’s not forget) that there is no rest period. Barcelona in particular, who’s suffocating pressure game is hard to stick to for 90 mins look to have found out the hard way of easing your foot off the pedal against a Premier League team
4. Let your feet do the talking
Jack Wilshire is clearly a superb talent in the making, a man who could be a true star for club and country however he’s far more talented with the ball at his feet than with a microphone at his mouth. Not that I want players to be devoid of charisma and for them to say nothing of any interest but it struck me as amusing that the young Arsenal man was telling his team mates that they need to get ‘nasty’ and ‘in the faces of Barcelona’ to win. Correct me if I’m wrong, but aren’t these the sort of comments that his manager usually gets rather upset about in terms of them encouraging roughhouse and bully boy tactics? I’ll leave it to Martin Samuel in the Daily Mail to make the case;
‘There was something all too familiar in Jack Wilshere's assertion that Arsenal need to get nasty against Barcelona tonight. It was exactly what the Premier League's supposed brutes say about playing Arsenal.
Where have you heard this sentiment before? 'We have to get in their faces and show them what we're about,' said Wilshere. 'We need to be a bit nasty to get the ball back.' From the mouth of a scowling centre half at one of the smaller clubs, it would be exactly the sort of game plan that Arsene Wenger says results in broken legs.
Wilshere qualified his statements, saying he spoke of nastiness only in a football sense, but players at Stoke City or Birmingham City do not overtly talk of causing injury either. It is unthinkable that managers such as Tony Pulis or Alex McLeish send out their players with instructions to harm.
Wenger never alleges that, either. He does believe, however, that there is a certain aggressive turn of phrase that helps create the climate in which accidents happen. Getting in the faces of the opposition is one such expression. What does it imply if not that Arsenal are going to try to rough up Barcelona's best players, to see if they fancy it? It is a very English concept’
5. Raul – legend or lucky?
Is it possible for a player to be under and overrated? What I mean, is that I’m struggling to think of where Raúl González Blanco places within the pantheon of world greats. This week, in the unlikely Royal Blue colours of Schalke rather than the white of Real Madrid he scored yet another Champions League goal to keep up his position as the leading goal scorer in the history of the European Cup. However where, and how should he be rated?
I was prompted to think of the whole under/overrated thing from a comment made by the esteemed Sid Lowe on The Guardian’s Football Weekly podcast this week. Lowe said that he felt that the former Madrid and Spain start was the recipient of an overrated reputation in his native Spain due to a career playing alongside talented players who made him look a lot better than he actually was. This was an interesting point to me, as a few years back, when the man was in his pomp (around 2000 – 2003) it would seem he never really got the credit that he deserved, certainly in terms of when awards were doled out (especially when one considers that Michael Owen got the Balon D’or) especially given he was an outstanding taker of chances and a goal machine.
741 games and 323 goals for Real Madrid cannot be down to just being alongside better players who put chances on a plate for him, but it was also clear that in his last few years, Raul was a shell of his former self and a man whose performances rapidly diminished as the club’s Galactico era fell apart. It’s also apparent that he was clearly a master politician, pulling strings behind the scenes at the club. This may be some reason for the slights on his legacy. Regardless of how we remember him, the man deserves an amount of credit for the very fact he is still plying his trade in an active European league, rather than riding out his career in America or in the Gulf. Clearly his legacy and how he is remembered is very much in his mind to.
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