Barcelona - Atletico de Madrid: Preview (Sunday 11am EST, GolTV)

By: Isaiah | October 5th, 2007

Whoever it is that schedules La Liga matches sure knows how to make me happy. They must have me in mind, I mean, they must since they’ve rearranged everything I want to see on TV this weekend so that I can not only enjoy the morning and early afternoon on Saturday with my lady, but also get everything prepared for the sports-fest that is the awesomest day of college football of the year.* And then on Sunday at 11am, Barcelona takes on Atletico Madrid, which means the afternoon is open for the NFL as well.**

So what of this “Battle of the Tiny Argentines” that we’ve got? Messi vs Agüero, they’re saying. Top goalscorers in the league and neither is old enough to drink alcohol in my country; they’re both the new Maradona and neither is even close, personality-wise, to the great Diego. Soft-spoken, family-oriented, and absurdly talented at this sport we all love so much (if you don’t love it so much, why are you here? Is it the pictures of naked referees? That’s Brasil, not Spain, sorry). But El Kun and El Messiah aren’t the only subplots available to the Spanish media. Imagine the Spanish media just letting things go…not possible.

One of the lead stories today in several different newspapers (Marca, EMD, Sport) was the connection - the veritable hatred, if you read too much into things as those 3 newspapers tend to enjoy doing - between Henry and Forlan: They played against each other in England, in the Champions League, and now in La Liga. Holy crap. Imagine the tension on the field when two meet: “5 star battle” EMD says about the two forwards…wait, they don’t play directly against each other? Oh, nevermind. And neither do Kun and Messi, for that matter.

What’s way more interesting is the connection with ex-Barca players. Luis Garcia, Simão, and Thiago Motta are all ex-Barcelona players. They’ve played 43, 25, and 138 games for the first team respectively, which means they know a couple people around the park…and hopefully those people distract them from the matter at hand. Motta, naturally, is injured, which is too bad for him and maybe even too bad for Barcelona. If I were an Atleti fan, I wouldn’t fancy Motta’s chances of stopping Deco, Messi, or Iniesta. Maniche should be much more up for the job, to be honest as neither team is a through-the-air kind of team.

Deco vs Maniche should be fairly interesting in the middle of the field and I can imagine both of them getting yellow cards. Most people tend to think that players from the same country will play nice with each other, but it’s Maniche and Deco, not some pansy-ass midfielders. I don’t know how many yellows Maniche has so far, but Deco has 3 in 5 games, so he’s not holding back. I’ve always thought Deco was a no-holds barred player, despite his size (5′8″ - 1.74m).

Other than that, what’s to talk about? It’ll be a great game, there’s no doubt about that. Both sides have been playing some scintillating soccer these days, with Atletico coming off a 5-0 away victory over Turkish club Erciyesspor in the UEFA Cup. Barcelona, of course, have also won 5 in a row, justl ike Atleti. The stats over this period are pretty ridiculous: 15 goals scored, 3 allowed for Barcelona, which is a pretty good series of games, I’d say, except that Atletico comes in having scored 17 goals while allowing a big fat 0 over that same period. So that’s actually better, it’s just that the toughest opponent Atleti faced in that stretch was Santander, while Barcelona took on Lyon (3-0), Sevilla (2-1), Zaragoza (4-1) and Stuttgart (2-0). Atleti played Osasuna (2-0), Erciyesspor twice (4-0, 5-0), Bilbao (2-0), and Santander (4-0). Still, those scores are pretty badass and they should be respected.

Milito and Puyol are healthy for the game, but there’s no official lineup yet, so we’ll just have to skip to the internal news, of which there is little.

Puyol, Messi, and Ronaldinho were voted into the starting lineup of the FIFPro World 11, which is awesome. FCB has more players in the lineup than any other team. The story can be found here. Congrats, guys. I’m very surprised Puyol is in this list, to be honest. Ronaldinho’s name carry so much weight that despite the fact that he hasn’t been one of the top performers the last year, he gets in. Messi, on the other hand, is in his deserved position.

The international callups have been issued: Abidal, Thuram, Henry, Milito, Messi, Ronaldinho, Deco, Xavi, Iniesta and Puyol were all selected, the last three for Spain. So congratulations to all those guys too…and again to the three who were congratulated above.

*OU-UT; LSU-UF. That’s all I need to know. And for full disclosure, I’m a Sooner fan. From Ohio. So I hate Idaho and Florida. Boomer Sooner and let’s go Tigers! And yeah, my sports allegiances confuse me too. Just wait till college basketball season…

**11amEST (7pm Spanish time) is the officially listed time for the game, but apparently there is another dispute about the TV rights and the game may change times based on that. Good lord, will they just stop with this already and iron shit out during the off-season so we know? I’ll try to keep this site updated with the latest developments, but if anyone who knows can post a comment, that would be super helpful to everyone, I think.