Monday 2 March 2009

Fast Analysis: Atletico Vs Guardiola

I don’t want to talk about the worst man in the match (the referee) who served us more than wiped us.

I don’t want to talk about individual players and how they performed.

I am sure lot of talking will take place about that. Or simply we will say, the players are tired.

The same players who are fresh enough to score 3 times are too tired to make sure not to get conceded more.

The same team that is so tired but still make only one substitution in the game against Lyon and another against Atletico, may be we have no better player than the ones we started? Sylvinho is better than Caceres who contained the kun in the cup game. May be Gudjhonsen is better than busquets?

The same team that even when tired they still play an open exhausting game after scoring twice.

The same exhausted team that his captain and most experienced player, instead of clearing out the ball to get ride of the late danger in the game, he decides to ignore his fatigue and to cut a ball by dribbling the opponent in our own box, why? Because we have to keep the ball in the run so we attack and attack and then attack.

And definitely, the team was so tired to clear the balls to the sidelines instead of sending it to the edge of the box , inviting the opponent players for a shooting carnival. Even though the coaching staff gave the clear instructions about this issue after it happened many times in some other games, but when You are exhausted thats how you clear the ball...Sure...Its a Fatigue problem.

I don’t want to talk about the little I know, but I want to seek the answers for what I didn’t understand. I am not an experienced coach, and no doubt I am so far from being a Guardiola, may be that’s why I have no right to be critical, who am I to know? So all your answers are welcomed, Dear Barcelona fans.

Dear Pep;

1) I didn’t understand how against a team having two dangerous strikers and two wings with pace we play Sylvinho and Alves and with only one defensive midfielder in front. I always mentioned the Vacuum tube between our Defense and offense where the opponent generate fast counter attacks. But at least we usually had 3 defenders to cover our back and the opponents were not Simao-Maxi-Kun and forlan. I didn’t understand how this was meant to work. I really like to know…

2) Playing Henry and Eto'o as forwards with Messi behind was a great idea, But I couldn’t understand what was exactly Eto’o role? Inbox striker? Second striker? It just felt he was only closing the space Messi needed to penetrate to the box.

3) Was Gudjhonsen really able to catch the pace of a game against the mentioned names above? I would understand if he played either an offensive role or defensive role, but Box-to-Box? Any hint?

I understand that the game tempo may turn unpredictable. So the first half was as they say its for players to do the job. But isn’t the second half for the Coaches? I didn’t understand the following:

1) Why had I got the feeling that Caceres was a must at the beginning of the second half? May be because I felt its too much for uncle Syl to keep the level of the game? Or may be because Alves was not fresh enough to bounce back fast, so Only Puyol and Marquez were there to face their destiny? Why do I remember the past Gio-Beletti partnership at the moment?

2) Why was it so certain for me that Busquets is needed in Gudjhonsen place in the second half to play beside Yaya? I just thought they can make sure the ball do NOT move that often around our box and inside it. It felt if we can dominate the ball, Messi and co can always have their ways to score more, especially when we were winning the game and Atletico had no choice but to open the field.

3) Why had I even thought it will be a good Idea to get Hleb as a forth midfielder to play beside Xavi, taking Eto’o out so we contain the opponent in midfield and open more space for counters? I thought even when Hleb move with the ball in circles as we all hate, he will end up driving Atletico players crazy, they NEED the ball to score a draw, they may foul him (creating free kicks for us or at least that fouling will stop the ball and slow down the tempo a little), they will run all for him and that may free Xavi a little. That’s what I thought at least.

4) When it felt that our Players knees are not handling the fast tempo anymore, I thought we can play it the German way. Absorb the tempo, cool down the heat, and then hunt a goal. But we kept playing our own way attack, attack and then attack...and don’t look behind you while looking forward!

5) I have been taught that in tough times, the coach need to stand on the line, so his players feel his presence. Was I taught wrong?

6) Two weeks ago, when we were still having the 12 points advantage, I said now its time for two Defensive midfielder to avoid exhausting transition and fast counters while we are passing through a heavy schedule. How come I was right?

I don’t know why I didn’t understand all the way this game was managed. But probably that’s why you are an accomplished footballer, and we still have a long way to be there, if we ever will, and I doubt.

But I am calm, because there is one thing I know for sure, I believe in you and I believe in the guys. They are the best in the world and they play for the best team. You are our football Icon and the club inspiration and legend. We will get out of this tunnel! This season is ours and no one will take it away.

I hope I understand more with time. Or may be it was just “Fatigue” NOT!!!!

Kind Regards, and forgive my ignorance.

Ramzi Tanani

24 comments:

Anonymous said...

well said ramzi, well said.

Anonymous said...

One of the main things i kept thinking after the game was: "What if David Villa" played instead of Eto'o?"

Why there were no subtitues after Kun's goal? we had 2 (!) more to do!
i wish we saw Pedro.
Henry was riding a wave, if we put Pedro on the left and Henry in the middle we could have gotten something out of this.

But even without it, we SHOULD HAVE gotten something!

Anonymous said...

ARE WE LOSING IT
Pep, i hope we are all having to see that 12 points is not considerable lead to think we are liga winners.We played one of the poorest games ever of the season no creativity in midfield and i believe if we lose one more game,then we will lose the title to madrid.Lets face it we are playing really badly of late.I blame Guardiola for benching hleb in a game that we needed to move the ball more in the opponents area,while starting "Badjohnsen" We must realise that messi cannot always display the magic we need so we need more creativity from others. I think pep either doesn't know how to use Hleb or imply doesn't have confidence in him,As for Valdes he is really the worst keeper in the world whether we agree or not.He saved a ball from drenthe when we player madrid but the fact is "Is Drenthe a good finisher?" He needs to be benched. I am very down hearted and if we lose again before facing sevilla then the title is for madrid whether we like it or not.it reaaly hurts to play good football atthe first half of the season and flop at the second half

Anonymous said...

i must say great analysis ramzi! i hope i hope guardiola has a look at it. well i dont understand one thing why dont we use the talents of players like hleb or bojan instead of sticking to henry, messi n eto'o? for some time i just forgot that hleb was even there in our squad. or maybe this defeat is a result of nervousness.
in the first 10 minutes of the game u could c how nervous the players were. we almost conceded 2 in first 10 mins.....

krankuba said...

I also cannot understand whats going on, guys :> But I think the team is losing confidence and this is the main reason for the last results. Plus, we have extremely bad luck :) That's it, sometimes you win, sometimes you lose. We have to go through this. With confidence! :>

Anonymous said...

I couldn't agree with you more, except Guddie was very effective in the match IMO (three passes that led to goal scoring opportunities one of which assisted Henry's second) and that's probably why Pep left him on the pitch. Besides his horrific miss in the first half, he played well overall.

When we play against an attacking team that won't play with 10 men behind the ball even against us, one of the side backs should be a defensive minded player, like Abidal and Cacares....

I just realized I'm repeating what Ramzi said. I won't go on because everything else I want to say has been said in Ramzi's analysis. These points just seem so obvious but I guess it's easier to point out the tactical mistakes after the game has been played as opposed to preparing for it beforehand.

Anonymous said...

I agree with u Ramzi, it's not the players' fault, it's Pep who seems are not so good at tactical changes or he believes in his method too much. I didn't really like it when he experimenting Messindependent and rotating players while we felt too comfortable leading with 12 points gap. It's good to try not to depend too much on a certain player but it's a BIG risk to take. Once we lose, we also brought down our confidence with us and people start saying that Barca is not THAT strong, it's time Barca start losing.. bla.bla.bla.. Because when we're THAT strong, everyone scared of us, everybody wants to be the first to beat us, the pressure is on them. And when we lose, the pressure is on us, and their confidence grow stronger.

I hate to say it but look at Man.U, SAF played the best player he has every game and didn't stop showing their hunger to win as much as they can. Don't listen to what people may say about Messindependency or what.. we just want to win!! The players that don't get playing time will have theirs in Copa. And if they wanna be in the 1st eleven, they have to fight for it. Because we're Barca, every player's dreaming to play with us and to do that they have to show their quality and work hard.

One more thing I've been wondering, where's our set pieces we played a lot in the 1st half of the season? While most of that set pieces were successful, why don't we keep working and playing those thing. And if I'm not mistaken, we've been playing high crosses/long crosses since we're at the 12 points gap. We all know that it's one of Pep's tactical dream (playing high ball to the target man in the box), but is it the right time to practice that while we're very good and very dangerous on the ground? We lack of tall players up infront, so I guess it's like giving the ball to the opponent if we play high crosses.

Sorry for my bad english and if I said something wrong, I'm not a good analyst. I just say what I feel right now and I say this because I love this club. I don't lose hope and I know that we will rise because this season is our season. Visca el Barca!!

sashi said...

gr8 one Ramzi... really gud one... i too felt the need for Busquets when we were 2-1 up in the early part of 2nd half or atleast when we were 3-2 leading near the end... why is Pep not using the substitutions??? wats he thinking???

Anonymous said...

as i said yesterday sashi i think pep is petrified by the "madrid is catching up" hype train ,as we have seen in last 3-4 games pep is using his best lineup available and doesnt rotate,doesnt use subs (unless of injury or if a player says he is exausted "yesterday sylvinho")

i believe in bojan,i believe in pedro,i believe in hleb and offcourse i believe in busquets .now is the time for the coach to use those players cause you cant win the league only with messi ,henry and eto.i dont care even if we get 7points behind we still will get the league in the end,we are infront we shouldnt be afraid to use all our players and refresh the squad.

ramzi your analysis was the best i have seen from you.its like you had read my mind.you are spot on on all your questions and i would love to have guardiola answer them in a press conferance.

the only thing we can do now is look forward ,we have the cup game now and it wont be easy.

Anonymous said...

I have to say that i think the main problem in this match was an excellent piece of tactical play by Atletico: containing Xavi.
If you look at the game you'll see that the ball literally moves from end to end all the time, especially in the second half (which resulted in all the chances in this game). Xavi's main task (above being the creative brain in playing exceptional passes through the defensive line of the opponent) is to bring a certain rest into the play of Barça by dictating the midfield. That obviously never worked out yesterday. The play shifted so quick from goal to goal that you couldn’t speak of any kind of rest.
I think we can all agree that Xavi knows that in certain periods of the match it is better to just play keep ball and work the opposition around than to try and wreak havoc in the opposing defence all the time. But because Atletico contained him as well as they did he didnt get the time he needed to bring that rest into the play. You can also see it in the amount of possession Barça had in the game: normally like 70%, yesterday 53%. That is quite a difference.

The most things about Valdes have already been said here, but I'll give it a go to. I agree with the people that believe the four goals weren’t (entirely) his fault, well at least the last three goals. A better position would result in Valdes saving Forlans cracker. But the other three goals were mainly errors of a defence that wasn’t quite up to pace all night long (which could be a result of the decrease in confidence caused by previous errors from Valdes).

Puyol was caught out of position all the time (just look at the space Aguero had in the match).

Alves didn’t really made a good contribution going forward, was therefore frustrated which resulted in a poor defensive display (shouldn’t got a yellow card though). And if Simao played a bit better things would have got worse for us.

It was quite obvious Sylvinho lacks games. He left too much space behind him as he didn’t knew when to stop going forward. And he indeed looked like he got a heart attack when going off.

And for Marquez, well I haven’t really seen him on the pitch except for one error which led to one of Aguero's goals. Maybe should have pressed some more on Forlan when he scored his first goal, but then again, that was so far out that he could not risk leaving the space behind him for Aguero to exploit.

I also want to say something about Eto'o. I hate all the comments being made here about him. Come on guys he scored 23 goals already this season, if it wasn’t for him we had like 20 points less. But I do agree that he should have scored yesterday, he got at least two clear goal scoring opportunities and should have passed the ball to Henry immediately when they went at Leo Franco in the final stages of the game, a really poor decision of him.

On the whole this game has cost us (and Atletico) an enormous amount of energy. I am eager to know how Guardiola is going to solve this against Mallorca (maybe he’ll finally play Bojan?).

One last thing: anyone saying the linesman was paid by Real for calling a penalty should also look at the other linesman which could be paid by Barça if you like to think in ways of paying the officials. The goal that was disallowed (I think Heitinga scored it) was as legit a goal you'll see. This would have resulted in the 1-0 for Atleti.

Well these are just my to cents. I have gone a little over the top length wise, but I hope I said something useful. And by the way, I’m not trying to be a new Ramzi or Kamikaze, haha.

Anonymous said...

i can remember the rule that when a player takes a penalty and the ball hits the post, that it's a new situation and the moment the ball hits the post is a new situation for an offside check. so, if a player hits the post when shooting a penalty and then if he scores with the second try, it would be an offside goal.

nearly the same happend to athletico yesterday. first the ball hits the post and then athletico scored from an offside position.

am i wrong?

Anonymous said...

Anony, what game were you watching?

Anonymous said...

I think Anonymous is right! When the ball hits the woodwork, it is treated as a pass from behind, so new positions are considered for the offside decision. Had Heitinga shot the ball before it hit the post, the goal would have been legal, because after the ball hit the post, Heitinga was in an offside position.

Anonymous said...

The game plan to beat Barca right now is to attack our defense faster than we can attack the opponent's.

We trotted out the worst defensive team we possibly could against Atletico. The entire back line made numerous mistakes. It was easily the worst defensive performance I've seen this year.

All of Atletico's goals were preventable. Our defenders need to remember that it is OK to hack a ball clear. Valdes has no concept of positioning.

People jumped on Pep for concentrating on defense in the summer market, and it's clear we need even more help. Pep is obviously aware of this and we'll be buying more this summer.

Pep's line-up tweaks are getting the better of him right now. We need Iniesta in a bad way. We also need Busquets and Pique to play whenever possible.

This match was a total disaster. There is no other way to say it. Real is back in the race. It was incredibly dissapointing to make the mistakes we did in a must win game. I think the pressure to win trophies is getting to the team.

I'm just glad we didn't play Manchester United because they would put at least 6 by us the way we played yesterday.

Anonymous said...

Whenever losing in a game Pep would say to the players to start over, play their own game. Right?
so when we drew Betis, Pep started just playing the same 3 strikers, playing Xavi, playing Yaya, playing Alves, and so on. He didn't make subs.
WELL why didn't he tell himself to start over, go back to his own game.
Rotate, substitute, change tactics.

Anonymous said...

since Eto'o's comments regarding his position at the club something has gone wrong within the squad. I think he is the best striker, but he is a bomb in a team.

Also Valdes is not good enough for Barcelona, admit it, Cesar, Buffon, Cech would not concede those silly goals.

We need Henrique back, we need Iniesta back, we need back-up for Alves and back-up for Abidal.
It would be great to see Benzema for Etoo, Ribery for Hleb, and some descent third midfielder for Gudjohnsen.

And I hope Pep will start to use all three subs, and try to use different tactics for away games, maybe something with 2 DM.

Anonymous said...

...have to say that you're right and it hurts...but liked much the part with getting out of the tunnel...hope so...don't know if i was right at the begin of the season by criticizing the board for not buying the one or other player to have more spaces 'cause you never know if things were gone the same way...even the highs...but i also totally agree that the ones we have are the best...the same ones who started,breaking records...everything is still on our hands...ONE LOVE...and BARCA FOREVER,EVER,EVER...EVER,EVER!!!!!...would also like to say so many,but i hope barca do the talking on the pitch...

Anonymous said...

...wanted to say...hope barca let their game do the talking on the pitch...;)

Anonymous said...

Btw, dispite the score, i really think the game SUCKED!

Both teams played so bad, i wouldn't rate anyone - and i mean ANYONE - more then 6.5!

Just a game based on the opposite team's mistakes... huh i was really disgusted to see it...

Anonymous said...

...to defend valdes a little,have to say,that he was not the only one making mistakes...but as a keeper you always get the blame,cause mistakes leading to goals...but when etoo or messi pass the ball the one or other time and don't be selfish,like gudjohnsen did (after he was even bad too) this thematic ain't get worth to talk about...it's always a teamsport...you win as a team and loose as one...

Anonymous said...

Everyone should look at this:
http://www.fcbarcelona.com/web/english/noticies/futbol/temporada08-09/03/n090302107372.html

Anonymous said...

You are so blind to even mention refere mistake in this article. Really

Anonymous said...

And you are so blind to even notice how you wrote the word "refereE".
Really

Anonymous said...

...to anony...Everyone should look at this:
http://www.fcbarcelona.com/web/english/noticies/futbol/temporada08-09/03/n090302107372.html...very cool...gives confidence...:)

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