Copa Preview: Barca – Espanyol; Thursday 3:30pmEST GolTV

By: Isaiah | January 28th, 2009

Picture pulled from this Flickr account. Also check out this collection.

It’s the second leg of the Copa del Rey match with local rivals Espanyol and we’re looking at a 0-0 aggregate scoreline. It means that in order to progress, FCB must win the match outright. No silly combo of draws or losses will help us out — just your standard victory. From my perspective, nothing less is acceptable against the periquitos because to have them, a team sitting in 19th position in the league and a bitter local rival, beat the “best team on earth” would be a legitimate disaster in this season of good fortune.

That’s not to say we deserve to win — no one deserves to win — but if we field our A team then we can win. I’m sure of it. Guardiola isn’t going to be out-foxed by Pocchetino, though if Pep decides that the Copa is where you rest players, then we’ll start with basically the same lineup as last time, but without Marquez and Keita, who are injured. Perhaps that alone will force Pep to put some players out on short rest for both this match and the upcoming Racing Santander league match. Or he can select Victor Sanchez and Pedro for his squad in an attempt to scrape by.

It’s not clear to me what Pep’s priorities are in terms of competitions, but it seems obvious that maintaining a severe lead over Real Madrid in the league is of the utmost personal importance to him. Why that is, I’m not quite sure because it seems absurd to imagine that Real Madrid won’t drop at least 7 points in the next 18 games. If they don’t, it would still be hard to worry about them because they’re down 12. I get the concept, though (my point is that in the first half we dropped 7 points and had the best half season ever; to expect them to not only do that, but overcome a 12 point deficit as well is something kind of ridiculous to me because it means that we’d drop 12 points — completely possible and in fact probable — while they drop not a single point at all, which is, of course, very improbable).

I believe we should field the best possible team in order to win the match, axe Espanyol (both in terms of their place in the Copa del Rey and in terms of their confidence in the league), and then go into Racing with a few “reserves” who happened to be named things like Bojan. Racing is no joke, of course, but this Copa match is do-or-die while the league match can be won with or without all of our starters.

Espanyol is coming off another craptacular result for them (unless 1-1 draws are considered victories now in Montjuic — and you’d think they would be with how they celebrated their 0-0 draw against us) that has sunk them into 19th in the league table and put them on the defensive for the rest of this campaign. They’re 4 points south of safety, earn an abysmal 0.80 points per game played (0.64 away from home), and have a -15GD (-13 away from home). That doesn’t bode well if they face the team that has scored 63 goals in 20 games and allowed only 14. 40 of those 63 goals came at home, no less. Apparently we get riled up to play in front of the home crowd and since I fully expect a couple billion people to be at the Camp Nou for this “final” then the boys should be even more fired up than usual.

As I said in the previous preview, it’s not about domestic league form because this is both a derbi and a Copa match, but there should be little doubt about who “should” win this match. Pep claims the match is vital, yet will he actually field a solid, proven team or will he force players who rarely get minutes together on the field to come up with the goods in a trial-by-fire kind of way? Rest Samu or Henry and put in Bojan, sure, but what about this starting lineup:

Pinto, Alves, Puyol, Caceres, Sylvinho, Busquets, Xavi, Hleb, Iniesta, Bojan, Messi

That’s a fair combo, if you ask me. You put in players who don’t get that much time (Pinto, Caceres, Sylvinho, Hleb, Bojan) and mix them up with some common names. I can understand switching Hleb with Gudjohnsen and Iniesta with Hleb if you’re thinking about a more physically-impressive midfield, but I’d prefer SPF 45 to be on the field with Xavi, who he understands so well. Put the game away and then make tactical substitutions. The fact that we can discuss the left side so in-depth and forget that we have both Alves and Messi on the wing is incredible, of course. We might even be able to put Laporta himself up on the left and still get the victory as long as our twin-mesmerizing-mini-mighty-mites do their thing over yonder on the right. The touchline has never seemed so sexy, you know?

Regardless of our thoughts as a collective blog — and the tactical discussions in the comments generally touch on all aspects of the game — Guardiola isn’t going to be releasing his squad list early to make it easier on us. Marquez is definitely out and Keita is very doubtful but could be included anyway. I suspect that we’ll see one of Henry or Eto’o in the starting lineup to provide some firepower, but my guess (above) doesn’t include either. Perhaps I’ve got my own Messi dependency — I would argue that it’s an Alves dependency — but I don’t see a true need to start either one. Let the kid get some minutes with a majority first team lineup and see if he doesn’t at least have a good game (best case scenario is that he bags a few goals, right?).

I’m not entirely positive whether or not the match will be shown on GolTV or not because their programming schedule has not been updated, but an online listing shows that they are going to show it at 3:30 tomorrow afternoon. Depending on a lot of things, I may or may not be able to watch it — I’m hoping I can simply because I’ve missed 2 games in a row and I’m more-than-likely going to miss the Racing game. So I’ve listed it as being on GolTV, but could update it.

If anyone wishes to link to streams in the comments, please do so.