Preview: Racing – Barça; Sunday 11amEST, GolTV

By: Isaiah | January 30th, 2009

February 1, 2009 is one of those rare Sundays when La Liga takes precedence over all on GolTV. There will be three (3) matches shown consecutively, just in case you wish to watch Barcelona, Valencia, and Sevilla all in a row. Because I’m moving on Sunday to my new abode and will miss the match, it means that for the 15th consecutive time that Barcelona and Valencia are playing on GolTV on the same afternoon, I will not meet Cesar from the Valencia Offside at Nevada Smiths. Awesome.

I don’t want to sound despairing, but I’m not approaching this preview very positively. I’m worried about our boys, who just played yesterday (Thursday) in a match that should have been over by the 66th minute (and was at 3-0) and are playing a tough away fixture on short rest. Kevin, of course, covered the previous game.

The thing is, Racing isn’t even that tough at home, they’re just sort of tough all around, though not overly so. They don’t score much, but they allow even fewer. They drew with us in our first match at the Camp Nou this year (1-1) and while that was the old, non-ubermachine version of Barça, Racing are getting us a second time right in the middle of our run of crazy matches. We’ve got Mallorca on Wednesday in the Copa del Rey semifinal first leg, so it’s no rest for the weary (Dani Alves doesn’t fit into that category*).

Our only goal in that previous encounter — our first goal of the season — was a penalty by Messi (pictured above), so I have to expect a bit more out of the team than just the one goal scored and I have to expect at least one of those goals to be from play. It’s odd to think about that match and the one before it, when we weren’t steamrolling everyone in our path, when I was as nervous as anyone about our long campaign. But now our bunnies have hatched and I’m counting them as quickly as I can. Some of them, fortunately, were able to become merbunnies, but I digress.

We’ve got a lot of bunnies — 63 in the league, by my count — but I always want our hatchery to produce more. Perhaps Bojan will get some time on the field, though of course not as a starter, that will be Henry and Eto’o, so that could help us save our big guns for later matches as well. The problem is in defense, where the CBs are just going to have to chug through, especially Pique who I’m expecting to play both on Sunday and on Wednesday against Mallorca. Caceres can switch out with Marquez, but without Puyol, we only have 1.5 set of CBs. Our Capitan Fantastico is set to be out for 10 days or, to put it in scheduling terms, through the Sporting Gijon match. Yikes. Better to rest him now when we’re not in CL games than to injure him for the rest of the year, though.

But let’s go ahead and get to the statistics:

Racing Santander is currently in 9th with 28 points and an overall record of 7W-7D-6L (23GF, 23GA). Their home record is actually worse than their away record; in El Sardinero they are 2W-5D-2L (9GF, 8GA). Crazy, if you ask me because I think of Racing as the same team that ended up 6th in the table in 07/08 and earned a UEFA Cup berth. Win Percentage calculated using GF^2/(GF^2+GA^2) (aka Pythagorean expectation) suggests that Racing should have won 55% of the available points at home thanks to their +1 GD (they scored 53% of the goals scored), but instead they only earned 40.7% (11 out of a possible 27).** However, they haven’t lost at home since their 0-2 defeat to Mallorca on September 28. They also haven’t won — in fact, they haven’t achieved any other result than a 1-1 draw — at home since beating Espanyol 3-0 on November 23. They did, however, beat Sevilla 0-2 at the Sanchez Pizjuan last weekend, so you know they’re still dangerous. They just loaned out their striker Juanjo to Deportivo Alves, probably because of Zigic, so that reduces their goal tally by…1. Yup. Juanjo had 1 goal in 14 league appearances. Zigic has 1 in 1.

They’ll play a closed game, much like what Espanyol played, but with a much tighter, better-organized back line than what Jarque was able to create (for once he didn’t earn the seemingly unfounded “best worst defender” award and was just a fouling machine; perhaps people will see him as the thug he is). However, it may not matter if they can’t muster any offensive surges to provide big Nikolas Zigic with some quality crosses. Barça will have to mark him and keep the ball from getting to him at all costs. There’s no doubt that, despite Pique’s recent aerial dominance, crosses into the box are our worst enemy. Set pieces (especially corners and in-swinging freekicks) are going to be the hardest to defend and I would like to see Pique man-mark Zigic even if everyone else is doing zone. Consider it a Zone +1 defense like you’ll occasionally see in basketball.

But who will start for Barcelona? I think the back line is pretty obvious: Valdes, Alves, Marquez, Pique, Abidal. I find it doubtful enough that Caceres is played as a starter (he has only started one match this year in the league), so much so that I don’t think there’s any way he gets in the starting lineup without Marquez’s injury preventing him from starting.

Who comes in front of that is probably up to Guardiola’s dart board, spin of the wheel, or however he decides lineups. Does he have small children that point to names and say “Daddy, that one today,” and he listens? Regardless, here’s my half thought-out, half Guardiolized lineup for the front: Yaya, Keita, Iniesta, Henry, Eto’o, Bojan.

Now, let’s start in the midfield on this one. Yaya, Busi, Xavi would be the ideal lineup, but both Busi and Xavi played 90 minutes against Espanyol. If the tall, young one (I know, I could be talking about Xavi here, right?) has it in him, then put him out there with Yaya and Iniesta. Xavi deserves a rest because he played 90 against Espanyol and 83 against Numancia. So rest Xavi, why not? Keita, if he’s healthy, is fully capable of playing the destroyer/roamer role that Guddy seems to have fallen into, so why not put him out there instead of Busi? And Iniesta can have his chance to be Xavi-for-a-day.

Because of how bad he was against Espanyol, I won’t be advocating Hleb get any time on the field. I’m sorry, but you can’t play that badly and expect to have a place in the starting eleven the next time around. Work your ass off in training and maybe you get to start against Mallorca. To be honest, I don’t even want to see Hleb as a sub. Messi, Xavi, and Busi can be our subs, with Caceres as well. Victor Sanchez is ahead in the pecking order at this point. Seriously. Don’t take him out back and beat him just yet, but seriously, stop being useless, Hleb. You’re good at this game of soccer, but you need to be more direct.

Yaya starts, that’s for sure. But everyone else around him can be shuffled. If Messi can start on such short rest, do it, but don’t risk him if you don’t have to. Bojan can play another 70-75 minutes because he’s young and hasn’t played all that often, so give him his second start of the year coming off a good game. His confidence won’t be higher if you keep him on the bench, after all, and it’s flip side of the Hleb question: play well and earn your starts. Especially if you starting helps us to rest some of our major starters. Why not keep Messi on the bench for the first 45, at least, if not a bit longer? Henry and Eto’o can swing around in a loop, in and out of the center as they have been doing all season with some pretty good results.

An aside about Hleb: I do think that Hleb’s inability to really mesh with the side has to do with his positioning and lack of playing time with the “first team”. That’s true, but he hasn’t show much inclination to adapt himself to the attacking nature of the team. Going forward, taking on opponents, and finishing your moves is a major part of being in Pep’s side. Kevin may be right that Hleb would be better as a Xavi, but that role would have been better played by several other players, I think, though few of them (Arshavin, Cesc, etc) would be willing to do it off the bench. Hleb is not an out-and-out winger and he’s certainly more capable on the right than the left, but he hasn’t shown a propensity for attacking rather than dithering and hoping others make the right runs. Our offense is about everyone making the right runs, including the person with the ball. Xavi wheels with the ball into space, perhaps arching backwards, but always into space, forcing the defense to swing with him, opening up passing channels. If you get everyone in that free motion, the offense clicks. Just ask Bob Knight.

The fear I have, that I alluded to earlier, is that we’re exhausted. We could come up blah in this game as easily as we could come up brilliant. Racing are not open and fun to play, they’re closed and stuffy, full of stick and grit, so we’ll need something special to unlock them. I’m not worried about the triple, really, I’m worried about the Copa, specifically. The league is there for the taking and even if we drop 2 points, we’ve still got a 10 point lead at worst (well 9 at worst). Official Prediction: 2-2. I just don’t think we’ll have the energy to take the game all the way through to the end. Goals by Henry and Eto’o, but we’ll never really get a full handle on this game. I hope I’m wrong, of course and that we’ll lay into them. So, that’s what I’ve got to say.

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*The Baja 1000 follows the course of what Dani Alves does as a morning workout in the summer. And no this isn’t a mancrush development: the World’s Strongest Man competition is designed using the actions Yaya takes while resting. The American Department of Homeland Security developed their Security Advisory System with Threat Level: Yaya above Severe/Red, but they nixed publishing it because it is the same as nuclear holocaust. The moon landings weren’t faked, only the liftoff; Yaya hurled the spacecraft up there.

**In case you were wondering, because of their monumental goal tally, Barça’s Pythagorean expectation is 95.29% (aka 57.18 points) while the actual result is slightly lower at 88.33% (aka 53 points). A coefficient of 2 might be a bit off, but I haven’t found a better one, yet. I ran the numbers for the full season last year and biggest deviation from expectation was that of Barcelona, which was off by a full 19pts (we were expected to earn 86.36pts, but only earned 67). Last year’s biggest overachiever was Valencia, who earned 8.3pts more than expected. If you score a lot of goals and allow few, your expectation skyrockets, of course and the opposite is true if you score few and allow many.

The largest deviations this year from expectation are Atletico underachieving by 7pts and Sporting Gijon overachieving 7.5pts. Barcelona, as I mentioned, are underachieving by 4pts. The expected final standings put Barça on 108.64pts, but the actual rate at which we are earning points estimates we’ll end with 100.7pts. Of course you can’t get partial points, but they’re there to suggest that they can break either way (and are more likely to break one particular direction than the other: the direction they’re closest to).