Barcelona @ Athletic Bilbao Preview: Cooking Lions With Chef Guardiola

By: Pedro | November 20th, 2009

Well, we’re stuck in it now, aren’t we? With the quickest of glances at the upcoming schedule, you’d reckon that Pep, Tito and Co. will have to sharpen their knives and put on their cowboy boots for what’s about to happen.

You see, they don’t just hand out stadium nicknames like bits of corn candy on Halloween – well, unless you’re Guti, whose nicknames aren’t suitable for this PG-13 rated blog anyway. Particularly when the nickname happens to be ‘The Cathedral’. And that’s exactly the nickname for that bit of grass that Athletic Bilbao play on.

It’s a venerable pressure cooker, just not the kind you’d see Gordon Ramsey or Wolfgang Puck using. Add in 22 players, a bit of football, and several thousand sprinkles of fans and you’ve got yourself a tidy way to spend a couple of hours on a Saturday night.

guggenheim bilbao

The Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao. Technically a more fitting sporting venue for Saturday’s match.

But over the past several years, Barcelona has acclimatized to the Basque pressure cooker…

Since 1999, Barcelona has notched 7 league wins out of 11 matches at the San Mamés. A pretty dashing record, most would reckon.

However, that pressure will get you in trouble if you’re head’s not on straight. Athletic always promise a lot of attitude and sweat for three points during nights in the San Mamés but it appears Barcelona have devised a reasonable formula to extract points and it largely involves doing the same old ; Establishing their brand of football and being unfazed by the hustle and bustle of the red and white striped men.

Like other stadiums that double as pressurized cooking equipment (see: Sanchez Pizjuan, Calderon, Reyno de Navarra, and The Bernabeu), the key is to not flinch at the surrounding atmosphere and speedy impetus of the opposition because they’ll never forgive you if you do.

But this clearly isn’t a problem because Barcelona are in like Flint when it comes to success in San Mamés. So good that it’s all rather academic.

Sport.es recently posed a query on whether or not Barcelona fans and masochistic Madrid fans who visited the sport journal site trusted Maxwell in the absence of the Abidal – a man who has the perfect physical physique to dismantle many counterattacks but apparently not perfect enough to avoid injury.

A whopping 89% have given the thumbs up to Maxwell for the next three weeks.

After a bit of research, it was identified that the 11% who did not approve of Maxwell were all part of the Abidal family. All of them except for a certain Josep Guardiola.

So far, Maxwell has made 4 appearances as part of the starting eleven in La Liga. Granted, the Barcelona chapter for Maxwell’s career is quite early (or quite late, you truly can never tell) but you do wonder if his offensive fluidity could be put to a bit more use. Especially since Abidal’s offensive toolkit consists of breaking the 40 meter dash time as he sprints to the endline. An extremely devastating weapon if only he’d do it with the ball.

dalai lama

Unimpressed with Maxwell, Josep coerces left back extraordinaire Dalai Lama to come out of retirement for the remainder of the season.

And with key fixtures against Inter and Real Madrid upcoming, one wonders if Maxwell will tactically fit into the tinkering of Josep, who may prefer Puyol as Abidal’s deputy.

But I may be guilty of thinking ahead because during the entire thought process that went into creating this article, all 4 minutes and 33 seconds of it, I could not think of a convincing enough reason for Maxwell to not get the nod for the match at San Mamés, which included ruling out the possibility of successfully genetically cloning a left sided Dani Alves.

Aside from the underused Maxwell, there’s been a minor injury crisis in the locker room, no doubt the work of multi-thousand Irish fans who’ve all recently converted to Voodoo – and it certainly wasn’t to wish a certain someone good luck either.

Ibrahimovic maintains a strain in his left thigh, ruling him out for the weekend and casting a few clouds of doubt on his availability for the critical matches next week. Abidal has become the unfortunate carrier of the H1N1 virus, which may have also maligned Toure, who is suffering from symptoms and a complete diagnosis is expected before the match. This sees Jonathan Dos Santos sneak into the traveling troupe.

Additionally, question marks remain on whether the notorious Henry has the fitness to go three full matches with such regularity.

What seemed like a nice buffet of options to choose from several days ago has turned into a selection that’s noticeably smaller in size, weight, age, but not hair (Thanks, Puyol and Chygrynskiy).

All bets are off on the availability of 16 year old Iker Muniain for Athletic because you should all be rooting for him to recover his fitness and scribble his own name onto the first eleven, which likely won’t be happening. A peculiar player to look out for as time goes on. Iker currently joins Toquero, Llorente and Mikaelsson as the four players who are fitness pending for the match on Saturday night, but Toquero and Llorente may still get the nod from Caparros.

Now, given the handsome recent decade record of results for Barcelona at the Cathedral, most will be reserving their fingernails for the visits of Inter and Real Madrid. Except for Maxwell who may run out of fingernail real estate to nervously bite on by the time Josep names his starting eleven for Saturday night.

Predictions to lose money by:

The Score: Athletic Bilbao 0 – 2 FC Barcelona
The Scorers: Messi, ‘Golden Boot’ Keita
Wildcard Bonus: Thierry Henry with two handball assists
The XI: Valdes, Maxwell, Pique, Puyol, Dani Alves, Busquets, Keita, Xavi, Bojan, Pedro and Messi