CL Preview: Barça – Bayern Munich, Wednesday 2:45pmEST, ESPNDeportes

By: Isaiah | April 7th, 2009

Bayern, meet The Yaya. The Yaya, meet Bayern. Go to war.

Sweet baby Jesus we have our Destroyer back in midfield thanks to recovery from injury/return from saving planets from Galactus/whatever he does in his spare time. He’s no Silver Surfer (how shitty was that movie?) because The Yaya is beholden to no one. Get it? I have a mancrush.

On a far more serious note, this game has me worried stupid. I’m nervous for the first time since…the last CL game. We have to win this one and we have to do it without allowing an away goal. That is why I think The Yaya is so instrumental in this game — I just don’t have the same confidence in Busi or Keita that I do in The Yaya, despite the obvious capabilities and talents of those two players. It’s all about midfield control, really, about dominating the middle third of the field so that our attacks re more fluid and their counterattacks stall out quickly, before Luca Toni can touch the ball in our box or Ribery can start running “downhill”. Monumental task, says I.

But let’s review the stats.

Bayern sit in 4th place in the Bundesliga with 48 points, 3 points behind leaders Wolfsburg after 26 matches, who beat Bayern this past weekend 5-1 to take the top spot. Bayern’s record looks like this: 14W-6D-6L (54GF, 38GA).* Their domestic away record is 6W-4D-4L (20GF, 16GA) meaning that they’re oddly worse defensively at home (20GA) but far better offensively (34GF). Interesting.

Barça are 12W-2D-1L (52GF, 10GA) at home in La Liga. This means they’re under-performing by 11.99%. Considering that they score (on average) 5 times as many goals as they allow…you’d think they’d win every game. That’s what Pythagorean Expectation thinks, too. I’m vacillating between nervous and confident here, if you can’t tell.

With Yaya and Hleb back, we’re at nearly full strength, but without Abidal we’re going to have to rely on Puyol on the left wing shutting things down, including a roving Podolski. Luca Toni can be bottle up by the central defenders (Pique and Marquez), but Alves is going to have to be on his game to stop Ribery and also provide support for Messi. If we can dominate the center of the field, Ribery will be forced backwards to receive the ball, meaning Alves will have more room to operate down the wing, creating an imbalance for Bayern that they’ll have to correct by either retaking the midfield (via van Bommel and Ze Roberto) or by trusting Lahm to stop Messi one-on-one the whole game. As we all know, that’s not an easy task and, in fact, I’ve never seen it accomplished by just one defender.

So here’s my starting lineup: Valdes, Alves, Marquez, Pique, Puyol, The Yaya, Xavi, Iniesta, Henry, Eto’o, Messi. I think we have to go for it in this leg and make sure we go to Munich with a fairly large lead, to avoid having to go full on for a win. The soccer gods are rarely that kind, it seems, so we shall not infuriate them by making unreasonable demands. Merely 3-0, please? 2-0 if you’re feeling like I have angered you with my worship of The Great Yaya. Or are you one and the same? Their defense is filled with injuries and missing players (you gotta feel terrible for van Buyten for losing his father and it doesn’t much matter whether or not it’s now, in the past, or in the future: sucks and the timing is always awful, quarterfinals of the CL or not), which Eto’o should be able to take advantage of with his speed and power. Dude is a beastlybeastman when he’s on his game and I expect him to put on his shootin’ boots for this one. If Bayern show up in Doc Martens, you know it’s going to be a tough night, but at least those’ll slow ‘em down.

So, we control the midfield, they die. They park bus, we win game. Simple, right? I should be a coach.

Official Prediction: 3-1. They’re going to score, I think, but so are we. 3-1 is a good score for us against a team as offensively potent as Bayern Munich. They score 2.08 goals per game in the Bundesliga, which means we have to watch our asses and make sure the counter attacks are well controlled. Expect a few tense moments before The Yaya catches up to whoever has the ball, eats their soul, and takes the ball. Always begin and end posts with love for The Yaya. It’s the way of the ~~Samurai~~ Barça Offside.

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Pythagorean expectation says that Bayern is currently under-performing by 5.34% in the league overall and by 8.59% away from home. Just to be clear, this statistic is just for the Bundesliga and it’s possible to argue that their overall and away form is much better if you consider the Champions League alone. The 12-1 destruction of Sporting CP would no doubt weight it heavily towards under-performing (because you can’t get more than 3 points per game), so keep that in mind when you’re reviewing these stats. I personally find it more useful to look at relative performances in the league rather than in Europe because there are more league games and thus more data, though I recognize the obvious argument of “but CL games are harder” — really? are they? So would Wolfsburg beat Sporting CP by at least 17-1 on aggregate? I’m sure they would…