Preview: Valladolid – Barça, Saturday 2pmEST, GolTV (maybe)

By: Isaiah | April 3rd, 2009

La Liga is back, suckas. And you know what that means: another preview! Holy cow it’s going to be a fun one, too. Well, fun if you find lots of numbers fun. Which I do, obviously. It’s not just because that, I suppose — get your allegiances right, though! — because Puyol and Iniesta are back in the squad list. Wait, we have a squad list? Yipee!

So reason to get excited: 1) Numbers (is that redundant?), 2) Puyol and Iniesta, and 3) a squad list.

Oh and the game might not be televised. That’s reason number 4, I suppose. Apparently there’s a dispute between La Liga, several of La Liga’s clubs (including Valladolid), and Audiovisual Sport, a TV company. There’s almost always some dispute at the beginning of the year concerning payments to clubs for various matches being televised and the first few weeks of the league are sometimes not televised because these contracts haven’t been ironed out. It seems, however, that Spain (or at least RFEF) has trouble with these contracts, for whatever reason. I don’t profess to know the ins and outs of these contracts nor do I have a pro-American viewpoint in terms of televised sports, but there’s a fairly straightforward way to deal with these things and I do think the NFL has a fairly good handle on what’s going to earn the most money possible. It’s not that I like most of the matchups on NBC’s night game or anything, but rather that the contracts are the contracts are the contracts. You’ll never get a midseason blackout simply because CBS decided that no, it didn’t really want to pay for a particular game or whatever. It’s RFEF’s responsibility to get all the teams onto one contract (or multiple if they so desire) and that’s that. No games should be lost because if you can’t figure something out in 3 months, you’re a turdbag and you deserve to be beaten with a sponge mop (the soft end).

So yeah, I’m blaming RFEF for not structuring the league properly, even if that’s not possible within Spanish law. I don’t particularly care because I think that if we’re going to use this whole capitalism thing we should use it the right way: to broadcast Barça games. There, I said it. My politics are out. I’m not a liberal or a conservative, a capitalist or a socialist; I’m a Barcelonista.

Back to regularly scheduled programming:
There’s a squad list! A squad list!

Valdés, Pinto, Alves, Piqué, Puyol, Márquez, Martín Cáceres, Sylvinho, Xavi, Busquets, Keita, Iniesta, Gudjohnsen, Messi, Eto’o, Henry, Bojan, Pedro!

Pedro!

I play with Pedro! in FIFA 09 in my Be A Pro season that isn’t the one that I play as Messi in. I’ve made it to being noticed by the national team in only 7 games, which is sweet, but it’ll be a few more before I’m actually called up. Speaking of which, congratulations to Sergi Busquets for making his international debut against Turkey in the 2-1 come-from-behind win. Looked like a dramatic game, too bad I was working like a chump and couldn’t watch.

So, what to make of this lineup? We get Puyol and Iniesta back a couple of days before Bayern Munich hit town with a whole lot of Champions League glory on the line. The decisions, therefore, are who to rest and for how long? Those are the questions to keep in mind as we go through who Valladolid.

Real Valladolid CF, based in, you guessed it, Valladolid, which is a city near-ish Madrid in the center of the country with a population of just over 300,000. If you’re visiting this week, check out the Semana Santa goings on. They’re currently 9th in the table with 39 points, 26 of which have been earned at home. That’s exactly 2/3 for any of you math majors out there. So they’re obviously much stronger at home (8W-2D-4L, 21GF 14GA) than they are away (4W-1D-9L, 21GF, 32GA). The thing is, you’re pretty much guaranteed (by statistics) to allow a goal per game and half of the time you’re going to concede a second to the pucela. Not that that’s how it worked out when they visited the Camp Nou on November 8, when Eto’o scored a first half quadruple (double brace? hat trick and a foul?) and Barça ran out 6-0 winners. Yet, the next week when Real Madrid came knocking on the doors of their Estadio José Zorrilla, Valladolid were the winners, 1-0.

You can’t underestimate an opponent and expect to win, especially not a team that has also taken the scalp of Villarreal (0-3 at the Madrigal) and Sevilla (3-2 at the José Zorrilla). Yes, they’re in 9th place, yes they’re total GF is -4, but as I argued in my State of the Liga, they’re taking someone big down before the end of the year. It wasn’t Sevilla, who got a 4-1 revenge win at the Sanchez Pizjuan last weekend, so you never know with Barça, especially coming off an international break and having two automatic starters returning from injury. And we’re also missing The Yaya, who would obviously have scored a hat trick were he playing, just cause.

So who do we start against a team that has allowed only 4 more goals at home than Barça themselves have allowed? And, to be perfectly clear, Barça has allowed 14 goals away. We’re going to get scored on, that much is certain, so how do we inject some offensive verve into a team that has so many offensive stars coming back from international duty. Also Hleb is injured. Don’t know if that’s worth mentioning, but there it is.

Here’s my suggested lineup: Valdes, Alves, Marquez, Puyol, Sylvinho, Busi, Keita, Iniesta, Henry, Eto’o, Bojan.

I want to start Pedro!, I really do, but this is about winning the league, not giving Pedro! time on the field. He can get his if we’re up 3-0 or if we’re out of offensive options and we want to replace Sylvinho or Busi with a striker. My substitutions would be as follows (in a perfect world): Caceres on for Puyol after 60 or 65 minutes, Xavi/Pedro on for Iniesta/Busi after 60 or 65 minutes, and Messi on for Bojan/Henry after 65 or 70 minutes. The reason for this is to conserve all of the players involved in that rotation. If we can afford not to have Xavi on the field, so be it, but I don’t necessarily think that is the best option. I’d prefer Xavi and Messi going on and getting some feel to the Barça before the Bayern match, just to make sure they’re back in game-speed rhythm with all of their buddies.

Here are my reasons for starting everyone else: Alves is unstoppable, unflappable, and a freakin’ machine. Plus we don’t really have anyone else to play right back unless we put a just-off-injury Puyol there and that’s not a good idea cause he’ll run himself retarded and break his own legs if need be to clear a ball that is already going out. And Cruyff bless him for it. Then we’ve got Marquez and Puyol in the middle to command all there is to command. Marquez is rested after being suspended for the Honduras-Mexico game (suck it, Sven, you’re a terrible coach and that’s all there is to it) while Puyol should be able to put in just over half a game and get back into a real rhythm. Sylvinho is on the left because I prefer to rest Caceres after an Uruguay match and because he (Sylvinho) wasn’t (surprisingly) called up for the Seleção so he’s well-rested.

In the middle I prefer Busi to Keita as the holding DM/”pivote” and I prefer Keita as the roaming crazy man to Gudjohnsen. Keita, too, is coming back from internationals, but his extreme athleticism doesn’t seem to be in question by many, so let him have a go at it. You could put Guddie here, but that, to me, would be a mistake without having Xavi at his side to dictate the flow of the game. Iniesta can handle most of those duties, but he will require Keita to play slightly more defensively than he does when Xavi is on the field because Iniesta tends to push the tempo more than Xavi, both via the air and via his own dribbling skills.

In the front there’s Henry, who I’d really prefer to give a rest, but I don’t think we can afford to have both Henry and Messi out and because of the travel and altitude change, Messi needs the rest more, I would think. Henry is wily and won’t run himself into the ground, which is good and also something that probably can’t be said about Messi. Eto’o gets the start in the middle because dude is a lion and lions need to feast when the feasting is good. He’s coming back from losing with Cameroon and he’s going to be pissed about it enough that Valladolid might suggest their players call in sick. Bojan is rested and can play on the right, so give him a chance to do so, or put in Pedro!. Bojan could use more playing time, I think, and he’s a much more polished product than Pedro! is, so I think there will be more immediate team cohesion if it’s Bojan who gets the start over Pedro!. And we’ll need team cohesion to beat a solid Valladolid side.

So here is my Official Prediction: 2-1 Barça. Don’t expect fireworks, people, because we’re going to be tired and a bit out of sync. But Eto’o will grab a brace. Awesomeness.