Preview: Recreativo Huelva – Barça; Sunday 3pmEST GolTV

By: Isaiah | November 15th, 2008

It’s a return to the oldest club in Spain, to the roots of Spanish football, I suppose, and a return to the Nuevo Colombino. Now that we’re through with Benidorm, it’s all downhill from here, right? After all, Benidorm was a Champions League team and we were able to squeak through against them…

Málaga got the shaft when we barely beat Benidorm the first time, then Valladolid got the big stick when we drew with Basel, so perhaps Recre isn’t really looking forward to the team they’re about to face, especially now that everyone knows that even mud can’t stop our scoring. Recre is coming off beating Athletic Bilbao in the Copa del Rey 2-1, but they lost 3-2 on aggregate because of their 2-0 first leg defeat.

Still, it’s an away game in the league, so you have to respect Recre’s chances. Or at least the betting odds. A 39% win chance is pretty good if you trust that site (and a 31% loss rate isn’t bad), but is it overly confident in Recre’s home abilities? In the league, Recre is a woeful 0W-3D-2L (3GF 8GA) while Barcelona enters on an 8 game winning streak, including a 4 game road winning streak (and are 4W-0D-1L, 13GF 4GA overall). All streaks must come to an end, but is a team with 25 points after 10 games going to visit a winless home team (they have 1 away win) with a total of 7 points actually have a higher chance of losing than drawing? It probably works out mathematically that an 80% away win percentage coupled with a 20% away loss percentage versus a 0% win/60% draw/40% loss rate would be 39%-29%-31% but that just doesn’t feel right to me.

Recre comes in with 1 victory and that away to Betis on the first day of the season. Since, it hasn’t been a very good run for them: they’re out of the relegation, but only because of goal differential and Numancia, who is the one at the bottom, has already played Barça, Real Madrid, and Villarreal. It’s doubtful that Recre is as good as Numancia.

Javi Guerrero leads them in goals with 2 (Barcelona has 5 players with more than that — in fact, Eto’o and Messi individually have more goals than the entirety of Recre’s team), so shutting him down is a pretty good idea. Other than that, only 3 other players have gotten on the scoreboard (Javier Camuñas, Marco Rubén, Adrián Colunga). It just doesn’t look good for Recre on the offensive front and Barcelona has the best defensive record in the league (8GA, tied with Sevilla).

However, Recre lost to Sevilla last weekend in Sevilla by the minimum (1-0). Though they’re second to last in scoring offense, they’re T-11 in defense with 15 goals allowed. That suggests a defensive fortitude that Barcelona will have to break down, but I don’t know if it will really be that hard. Málaga beat them 0-4 at the Nuevo Colombino and while I don’t think this means we’ll beat them 0-8 (after all, we beat Málaga 1-4), it’s just another reason why we’re going to knock them stupid.

Samuel Eto’o claims he’s just getting started and that the best is yet to come from him — I suggest he proves himself right by scoring five in a half against Recre. It won’t happen, of course, but it’s fun to joke. We actually need Eto’o to pass the ball to teammates who then score. Thierry Henry is the player I’m directing that at the most.

I’ll discuss Henry here, since he’s been the topic of several conversations in the comments section: we are, as has been pointed out, judging Henry based on his goal return rather than on his wing play. We consider him a striker so when he drops a big fat 0 onto the score sheet, we bemoan our silly purchase of an over-the-hill Frenchyfroggysurrenderer. What kind of a brain aneurysm did Txiki and Laporta have that caused them to purchase him? Well, there are several factors that we’re not considering.

1) How many goals has he been involved in this year? My guess is that it’s a lot more than people would give him credit for, but we can’t know how many without watching his every move in every match or by pushing to include stats like that in the general conversation about soccer/football. Without stats like VORP, PER, or Efficiency, there’s no real way to judge the little things that Henry does. We give Iniesta credit for these little things because he does a lot of fancy dribbling, but is Henry actually contributing less in his particular position than an “average player” or even a “good player”? I’m planning on discussing ways to integrate these stats next week, so stay tuned.

2) How many goals do we expect from Lionel Messi, who plays a roughly equivalent role on the right side? Apparently we expect Henry to score as often as Messi, but we fail to consider that Messi plays almost twice as much. Messi has logged 753 minutes in the league, scoring 6 times. Henry has logged 478 minutes and has scored 4 times. By minute, that’s a better rate. So we have to go with statistical analysis that is just not available at the moment. And Kevin, you’re welcome for this.

So when I say that I’m directing the “get some goals” statement at Henry, I mean that the team needs to help Henry get more into the matches. This will open another side to the attack, making us even more lethal. Henry is good at his little move to the left, so let’s get him the ball in one-on-one situations rather than pushing the ball to Messi on the wing every time, making him face 3 or 4 defenders. Once Henry becomes the focus of defensive efforts, it creates space for other players, such as Hleb and Keita to step in to the void at the edge of the box and take shots (by the way, Alex, shoot the ball); rebounds will become Eto’o’s may source of scoring, or incisive passes from Xavi that release him one-on-one with the keeper (like we’ve been seeing the whole season).

But back to the game at hand, against Recre. According to reader Andrew, Barcelona has never lost at the Nuevo Colombino (though that stat is a little misleading since the stadium was only built in 2001 and Recre hasn’t been in the top flight that whole time). Still, it’s a record worth keeping. But who will be the warriors we place on the field of battle? This time around we have a squad list (Thank you, Guardiola!)

Valdés, Pinto, Alves, Sylvinho, Cáceres, Puyol, Márquez, Piqué, Busquets, Touré, Keita, Xavi, Gudjohnsen, Hleb, Messi, Eto’o, Bojan, Henry

Iniesta, Abidal, and Milito are missing through injury, so we’ll probably see something like this:
Valdés, Alves, Piqué, Márquez, Puyol, Touré, Xavi, Keita, Henry, Eto’o, Messi

Now, we all know what this means: Guardiola will start an entirely different lineup. So go ahead and guess as to what it will be in the comments. Bonus points to whoever gets it 100% correct. It won’t be me, so don’t guess mine. I believe I’m 0% on full lineups, though I’m 100% on keepers.

The picture at the beginning of this post is of Eto’o scoring with his head against Recre last year in the Nuevo Colombino. I think that he’ll add to his tally, but so will Messi and Xavi. I mean, they’ll add to their tallies. Valdés gets another clean sheet. Official Prediction: 3-0 to our boys in blaugrana. I want to see Keita and Yaya get on the scoresheets too, though, so I’m rooting for them to pull the trigger from deep more often. Yaya has the strongest shot I’ve seen in a while, really. A true howitzer.

As always, please refer to the comments for places to stream the game, but if you’re into watching it in a pub/bar, check out the list at Where to Watch. And feel free to suggest your own additions.