Toure has ascended to the top of the Barça pantheon in my eyes. And he’s bigger than the Parthenon. I mean physically, not like in historical value. But that too. Yeah mancrush!

No question about the Man of the match: Kolo’s bro.

And Henry has adapted much better to Spanish football than he’s given credit for – at least in one regard. He’s learned to drop to the ground and moan after feather touches. I thought the dive at the edge of the box was card worthy, and it pissed me off even more when he kicked out the leg of one of Wisla’s midfielders and then gave said player a look of ridicule. Acting a punk last night, Henry was.

…and what really got me about Will (besides the fact that he’s disapeared) is his use of ‘blog’ in quotes. I’ll be the first to admit I got alot to learn re futbol…but you dis’ the bloggishness of this BLOG….Kev’s Mom stilleto’s gonna find yo’ as’

I think that Guddie is a horse for a course. He needs a different system and league to truly excel in terms of his skill set. Our game, and the Liga in general, moves too rapidly for him.

Will, we’re all okay with criticism, particularly when it comes from Switzerland, a new flag that graces our comments section. No worries. Game evaluations are opinion, really, based in the observer’s time spent watching the game and knowledge gleaned therefrom. Some will agree, others won’t. That’s okay. It’s all part of the debate. If you return and would like to contribute, you’ll be more than welcome.

Mat, Pique and Puyol were sort of all over the place, IIRC (and I’ve deleted the match from my hard drive), Puyol started out on the right center and Pique at left center. After that, nobody was where they started out.

Good point about Alves, Mat. It’s impressive the way he attacks and tracks back. If you watch him, he’s really skilled at sort of reading the ball, and getting ready to mark a counter. But yes, the right center defender better get ready to do some running this season.

Thanks for all the support, guys. Being compared to Yaya in a negative light is a compliment, but since ajani did it in a positive light, well that’s just the bee’s knees, isn’t it? Even Will agrees that we’re a fun read, though!

I think that we always welcome criticism on this site (if we don’t, consider this the welcome mat, please remove your shoes as you enter so that you don’t accidentally track in insults) and I hope that Will comes back and feels comfortable enough to open a debate about our rating system or whatever has offended him. Perhaps he’s Icelandic and takes it as a personal affront that we attack Gudjohnsen so much.

I was, actually, just thinking about Guddie this morning on my way into work and using Nick Hornby’s Fever Pitch as a reference…In that book, Hornby discusses an unpopular Arsenal player (whose name escapes me at the moment) in much the same way that we discuss Guddie. At the end of the section he discusses how that player, as terrible as he was for Arsenal, was a hundred times better than anyone he ever knew or had played at his university. The same is true for Gudjohnsen. He is, in reality, a fantastic player. He’s better than you are; he’s better than I am by an infinite factor, that’s for sure. But he’s also surrounded by players who are even better and that makes him look bad. He’d be great for a mid table club and everyone would talk about how good he is, but at this highest of levels, he isn’t the player Barça needs, so we rag on him. I would never say he’s not good at the game of soccer in the actual sense (and note that I do, indeed, refer to it as soccer most of the time; football starts tonight!), but he’s bad in the sense that Kwame Brown or Chad Pennington are bad. They’re professionals at the highest levels, so we expect so much out of them. Perhaps its not fair, but we’re not here to be fair or kind to their egos. We’re here to support Barça, to discuss how to make Barça better. Right.

And I referenced 3 American sports leagues in that paragraph because I couldn’t think of an equivalent footy/soccer player. My mind is blank on that front and I’ve got like a million things on my desk this morning to complete. Yet apparently I have time to write up this whole response. Damn, my priorities are wacky. Time for caffeine!

and jake, if it were up to me, we’d build Xavi his own freakin’ stadium. The guy is awesome. When he retires, we should rename some random tournament after him just to immortalize him totally.

Maybe I’m getting a little carried away.

But one thing is true: I just realized how much I love GolTV. I mean, I can’t even get local broadcasts on my local MLS team–normally one would have to actually go to the stadium to see the games, or listen to it on the radio which is awful–so the fact that I can watch almost every Barca game on my TV here, an ocean away, is AWESOME!!