La Liga 2007/08

21

Up to before these group stages (CL only):

1 Ral 57 111 1995 Real Madrid
2 Ruud van Nistelrooy 52 64 1997 PSV Eindhoven, Manchester United, Real Madrid
3 Andriy Shevchenko 46 89 1998 Dynamo Kyiv, A.C. Milan, Chelsea
4 Thierry Henry 43 85 1998 AS Monaco, Arsenal, FC Barcelona
5 Filippo Inzaghi 39 73 1998 Parma F.C., Juventus, A.C. Milan
6 Alessandro Del Piero 36 79 1996 Juventus
7 Fernando Morientes 33 78+ 1997 Real Madrid, AS Monaco, Liverpool, Valencia
8= Patrick Kluivert 29 ? 1994 Barcelona, Ajax Amsterdam, PSV Eindhoven
8= Roy Makaay 29 ? 2000 Deportivo, Bayern Mnchen
10 David Trzguet 28 ? 1998 AS Monaco, Juventus

Up to before these group stages (CL and EC):

1 Ral 57 111 1995 Real Madrid
2 Andriy Shevchenko 56 100 1994 Dynamo Kyiv, A.C. Milan, Chelsea
3 Ruud van Nistelrooy 54 65 1999? PSV Eindhoven, Manchester United, Real Madrid
4 Alfredo Di Stfano 49 58 1955 Real Madrid
5 Eusbio 47 64 1961 Benfica
6= Thierry Henry 43 77 1998 AS Monaco, Arsenal, FC Barcelona
6= Filippo Inzaghi 43 ? 1998 Juventus, A.C. Milan
8 Fernando Morientes 39 87 1997 Real Madrid, AS Monaco, Liverpool, Valencia
9 Alessandro Del Piero 37 79+ 1996 Juventus
10 Ferenc Pusks 36 41 1957 Budapest Honvd FC, Real Madrid
11 Gerd Mller 35 61 1970 Bayern Mnchen

22

Cheers for telling us what I had already said :emm:

23

Can’t see your images Flango. Why didn’t you just copy and paste?

24

Apologies wocko. I didnt know my images weren’t visible to some. I used the picture purely for aesthetic purposes.

25

Barca and Madrid both lost last night.

Raul Tamudo got a goal of real beauty last night for Espanyol, an exquisite chip over Casillas. They beat Madrid 2-1.

Villarreal won 3-1 at home to Barca and move into 2nd place.

Valencia won 4-2 at Deportivo and it’s very tight at the top:

Played/Points

1 Real Madrid 8 19
2 Villarreal 8 18
3 Valencia 8 18
4 Barcelona 8 17
5 Espanyol 8 16

26

Espanyol - Madrid highlights below.

Tamudo’s chip is 2:20 in.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HVul1fgSlx0

27

Beautiful goal from Tamudo, a good week nafter his goal for the Selection during the week! Casillas wasn’t even that far off his line but was really shown up.

Cracking game in store tonight, Atletico v Zaragoza, two in form teams and who fought tooth in nail for most of last season for a UEFA Cup spot that was surrenedered very easily in the end.

Fucking pissed off with Sky’s nonsense for Sunday games. Had presumed the above would be this evening’s offering, Sky however are showing an unspecified game at 7pm, this evenings fixture programme is five games at 4pm and one at 8 pm. Will probably have ‘‘Sky Sports Live’’ in the corner of the screen aswell :angry:

28

Last point is particularly relevant SoulDressing. They’re forever pretending games are live and they’re at them when they’re commentating on a delayed screening from London.

I remember a match a couple of years ago with Real Madrid at home. Gerry Armstrong was the assistant commentator as usual but he was also the studio guest for a subsequent match. He was pretending he was at the Real Madrid game and when they went to the studio between matches he started complaining about the flights of stairs he just had to come down in the Bernabeu. Sky expected us to believe that not just their commentary team but that their presenters and analysts were all at the game.

29

They haven’t shown any live games on a Sunday this season afaik. Some dispute in Spain that’s affecting coverage according to Sky. But that’s not to say they haven’t had the ‘live’ icon up there in the past. Gerry Armstrong is a great man so I forgave him for trying to pull the wool over my eyes.

However, the thing that’s really annoying me about their coverage this season is the fact that Warren Barton has been added to their team. I get some fed up listening to that whiny-voiced twat saying, ‘They done’, ‘They was’ etc etc.

30

Barton’s a dullard alright, and he obviously knows someone in Sky as he is not involved in football in any capacity these days, as he runs some kind of holiday home business as far as I know. Consequently I fail to understand how he can be considered fit to analyse the game from the studio any better than any of us would analyse it from home.

Still though, it’s a great job even if you are commentating from the studio. A mate who works in Setanta tells some great tales of listening to Pat Dolan screaming his head off in a studio in town while doing the Italian games a few years back. :grin:

Great win for Athletic today, hopefully the annual relegation scrap won’t be as nerve-wracking as in previous years. :dizzy: I don’t think there will be another weekend in the entire season when both Barcelona and Madrid will lose, so Valencia did well to make hay while the sun was shining. They’re definitely in with a squeak, but they really are an enigma under Sanchez Flores.

31

The Sunday match was last night’s Villereal v Bar$a game.

Fiasco, its getting worse…

32

SoulDressing wrote:

The Sunday match was last night’s Villereal v Bar$a game.

Fiasco, its getting worse…

Are they for real? Thats diabolical. Shameful stuff.

33

As I said it’s been like that all season on Sundays (no problem with Saturday’s live coverage for whatever reason). They have been showing one of the 4pm kick-offs at night but tonight none of today’s early kick-offs must have impressed them so they plumped for last night’s game. Just saw the first VillaReal goal there - class.

34

Sid Lowe’s article this week:

Villarreal thrive in Riquelme’s absence

No matter that Juan Romn Riquelme is still pulling Argentina’s strings; at club level the midfielder is not being missed one jot.

Sid Lowe
October 22, 2007 11:43 AM

You’re one of the world’s finest footballers, a creative midfielder of incredible vision and an idol for fans. You’ve topped the assists charts, got almost 30 goals in two seasons from midfield and carried your side to the European Cup semi-final for the first time in a 75-year history mostly spent in the amateur Third Division. You made your home town the smallest town ever to go so far* and were just an away goal from reaching the final. But you missed the penalty that could have taken you there, you haven’t played a single minute for your club in over eight months and the sporting director admits you’re not going to either. The president can’t stand the sight of you and nor can the coach.

What do you do?

Do you: a) spit your dummy and run to the press; http://www.thefreekick.com/board/public/style_emoticons/<#EMO_DIR#>/cool.gif thrash out your differences in showdown talks; c) issue a come-and-get-me plea to all the big clubs and a few little ones too, just in case; d) tell everyone how professional you are, talking about how you’re not going to talk about it, train ever-so-hard (while the cameras are on), and vow to “prove everyone wrong”; or e) shrug your shoulders and stay put, but refuse to talk to your coach, silently waiting for the chance to stick it to the bastard by scoring for your country? Against his country - 'cos that’ll learn him.

You do e of course (do option e, that is). At least, you do if you’re Juan Romn Riquelme. Dropped after Villarreal grew tired of indulging him - and after he refused to meet toilet-tycoon president Fernando Roig - Riquelme kept as silent as ever, didn’t move on because Atltico Madrid’s streamlined four-man, crack-signings team couldn’t reach an agreement while Boca Juniors couldn’t stump up the cash, and just waited in silence for his chance. Last week he got it, when two fantastic free-kicks defeated “Manuel Pellegrini’s Chile”, sparking a media crusade in Argentina that left the Villarreal coach complaining of being treated like an “international terrorist”.

Footballers are always banging on about letting their feet do the talking - which is probably not a bad thing considering what comes out of their mouths - and this was the classic example, the perfect riposte, a timely reminder of what Villarreal were missing, an indication of the ridiculous folly of leaving a genius sitting about twiddling his thumbs, unloved and unloving. For 8m a year.

Only it wasn’t. And it wasn’t because quite apart from the fact that the Argentinian’s ostracism is partly self-inflicted and that goals make selling him easier, if Riquelme let his football do the talking so too has Pellegrini. And right now Pellegrini’s Villarreal are even better without Riquelme. When Roig demanded Riquelme be ditched, it was a blow for a side whose success was built on his slow-motion creative genius and Villarreal subsequently won just three in 12, sinking perilously close to the relegation zone. But, bit by bit, Pellegrini rebuilt a side that stepped out of Riquelme’s shadows to become what AS this morning described as the “new Brazil”.

Privately, many players admit feeling liberated without Riquelme and that’s been borne out on the pitch. Mati Fernndez provided seven assists in the second half of last season alone; Cani is finally showing the talent that made him the club’s record signing; Jon Dahl Tomasson is not the Newcastle flop; and Marcos Senna is as consistently excellent as ever. Although top scorer Diego Forln departed in the summer, this season they’ve been supplemented by American-Italian Giuseppe Rossi, who’s hit five in eight, the returning Nihat Kahveci, emerging youth-teamer Bruno Soriano, and the homecoming of on-loan Santi Cazorla, the grinning kid dubbed ‘Ronaldinho’ by his Recreativo team-mates because he’s just as friendly, just as ugly and just as good.

But the man who has really led Villarreal, taking on Riquelme’s role, is Robert Pires. The former Arsenal midfielder turns 34 next week and, with his hunched shoulders, knock-knees and flat-feet, you can tell. When he runs it looks like it hurts and he has only managed to complete one game this season, but he remains a fabulous footballer. Having picked up a knee-ligament injury against Cdiz last season, Pires didn’t even start a match for Villarreal until they faced Barcelona in April, making an immediate impact. He dictated the game and scored the opener in a 2-0 victory - the first of eight successive wins, the best-ever La Liga end-of-season run and one that carried Villarreal to a Uefa Cup place.

Six months later and Barcelona were again in town. Again, they lost (their first defeat since the last visit). And again, with the exception of an utterly ridiculous back-heel almost as silly as this moment of madness video 1 below), Pires was sensational. After Cazorla’s lovely second-minute opener (video 2 below), Pires was brought down for two penalties, scored by Marcos Senna, and stood at the heart of everything Villarreal did on the way to a deserved 3-1 victory.

It was Villarreal’s 16th game since Pires made his first start and they’ve won 14 of them. Thanks to a first defeat for Real Madrid at excellent Espanyol - for whom Ral Tamudo chipped a wonderful goal that should, but won’t, bury the Ral-for-Spain debate - it also saw Villarreal climb into second, just a point off Madrid and looking like they could mount a real challenge.

Still at least Bara and Madrid had their excuses ready what with the “Fifa virus”. And yet the three scorers at Montjuic were the three scorers for Spain and, on this week’s evidence, it’s not so much playing for your country that’s the problem as celebrating the fact - the Catalan press gleefully reporting that naughty Robinho missed his flight back after a huge party at the Catwalk Club, where he allegedly ordered 40 condoms, drank himself silly, and didn’t leave until 5am. Unlike their own ever-so-responsible Ronaldinho, of course, who left at 11.

Just a shame it was 11 in the morning - and in the boot of the car.

Results: Villarreal 3-1 Barcelona, Deportivo 2-4 Valencia, Espanyol 2-1 Real Madrid, Recreativo 0-2 Mallorca, Getafe 2-0 Murcia, Betis 1-1 Racing, Valladolid 1-2 Athletic, Levante 0-2 Sevilla, Atltico 4-0 Zaragoza, Alonso 0, Hamilton 0, Quimi Requena 1. Ha!

[*Yes, yes, apart from Monaco. But Monaco doesn’t count.]

Video 1: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YMJr3xo8-AU

Video 2: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aMA7EMFtySs

35

Did Sky come to some agreement with the broadcasters now? They’re showing Zaragoza against Getafe live tonight.

36

Valencia feeling the heat after Bara humbling

After another crushing defeat for Los Che, Rubn Baraja’s suggestion that unhappy fans should ‘burn down Mestalla’ looks like a red rag to a bull
Sid Lowe
December 17, 2007 4:29 PM

Valencia is the home of the three-fingered handshake, a city with a pathological penchant for pyrotechnics. The setting for the world-famous Fallas festival where the streets shudder and bang, where dogs hide under the table howling as neighbourhoods compete to build the biggest bonfire and blow off the most digits, where a bunch of nutters lock themselves in a big cage and chuck rockets at each other. A city with a burning obsession for burning things, where babies are born with a petrol can under one arm and a box of matches under the other, where happy football fans celebrate with smoke bombs and firecrackers and unhappy ones leave the team bench ablaze.

Valencianos certainly don’t need telling twice to set fuses fizzing. So when Valencia midfielder Rubn Baraja suggested that the only thing left for fans to do now following “continuous protests and the worst insults”, after reaching a point at which they “couldn’t be any angrier”, was to “burn down Mestalla” he really was asking for trouble.

But if Baraja was waving a red rag to a bull, his team-mates were standing there in a purple posing-pouch with a target painted on the front, munching on a bloody steak, flicking the Vs and gloating: “Bring it on, Bully, you wuss! Think you’re hard? Pah! You don’t scare me with your horns and your swingers, you’re rubbish.” Because, while Baraja sat sadly in the Mestalla stands on Saturday night, out on the pitch his team-mates were turning in another truly diabolical display in front of their flame-loving fans - one so bad that even the club’s cuddly bat was covering his eyes (which, being a bat, wasn’t actually necessary). One so bad that it seemed only a matter of time before Mestalla’s crumbling concrete went up in smoke. Rather like the club’s title ambitions, in fact.

Valencia versus Barcelona. A big night at Mestalla, covered by one Spanish television channel and not quite covered by another, whose cameras couldn’t get the whole of the pitch in, as the TV war rumbles on; and proceeded by the “singer” offering the most out-of-sync lip-syncing since Silas. The perfect night, said coach Ronald Koeman, for his side turn the corner. Trouble is, waiting round that corner was a bunch of tooled-up hoodies with videophones. As Valencia gathered in the tunnel before the game, Joaqun, the cheeky scamp who admitted to being breastfed until the age of eight, harangued his team-mates by shouting “Come on lads, let’s do them. There’s not many of them and they’re malnourished”; as Valencia gathered in the tunnel before the second half, Santiago Caizares harangued his team-mates by shouting “Come lads, for fuck’s sake, let’s avoid this becoming an embarrassment.”

It was too late. Within fifteen minutes Valencia had been one down, within half an hour it was two, by half time they had not had a single shot on target. Fifteen minutes into the second half, Valencia were three down - and if it didn’t end up as humiliating as the night that Madrid tonked them 5-1, that was only because Bara eased off. And because Leo Messi hobbled off with an injury that will keep him out of next weekend’s Bara-Madrid ‘derbi’.

True, Bara played rather well, the returning Samuel Eto’o scoring a wonderful first and finishing a 20-pass move for the second, while Eidur Gudjohnsen capped his best performance since joining Bara with the third. But Valencia were desperate. Bill Werbeniuk could out-sprint Carlos Marchena and Ivn Helguera. In flip-flops. Fernando Morientes might as well have stayed at home, so little did he see the ball. And ngel Arizmendi is about as likely to score on Saturday night as Joseph Merrick. There is no pace, no edge, no spirit, no fitness, no togetherness and no confidence whatsoever. “The dressing room was like a cemetery afterwards,” sighed Joaqun. “Valencia,” ran the cover of the city’s edition of AS, “are a total write-off”, while Super Deporte asked: “Can they sink any lower?”.

The answer, many in Valencia fear, is yes. What made Saturday night worse was that it wasn’t a major surprise - Valencia have been beaten five times at home this season, conceding 18 goals. And what made it even worse still was that things are getting worse just when they’re supposed to be getting better. When portly president Juan Soler sacked Quique Snchez Flores, he replaced him with Ronald Koeman, the man Spaniards call Tintin. He might as well have gone for Captain Haddock. Hell, even Captain Sensible would have been better.

Koeman has changed the training, changed the rules, changed the formation, changed players’ positions, and changed results - for the worse. When Quique was sacked, Valencia were four points off the top and still alive in the Champions League. Today, they are 13 points off the top and not just out of the Champions League but out of the Uefa cup too, having turned in the second worst Spanish performance ever in the tournament.

The day Koeman arrived he ripped everything up and started again, embarking on a kind of pre-season - even though the real season was a quarter gone. He was supposed to bring an attractive, attacking style to Mestalla but Valencia have only scored in one of eight matches under him and have now gone longer without a goal than at any other time in their entire history. Worse still, with Koeman complaining about the squad and leaving the club’s record signings out in the cold, the sporting director complaining about Koeman, the players complaining about everyone and everything, and the real architect of the chaos still squirming in his presidential chair, there’s little sign of things getting better in a hurry.

No wonder Baraja thought Valencia’s fans were ready to burn down Mestalla. But, as the rain teemed down, their response was even more telling. Far from throwing in a gallon of gasoline and a couple of matches, they threw in the towel.

37

Real really did a number on Barca tonight. Totally outplayed them. Ronaldinho did nothing and either did Eto. Iniesta likes going to ground a lot. Real have a 7 point lead going into the break. They look safe even at this stage for the league.

38

Twas quite a comprehensive 1-0 victory alright. I was very impressed with how Real defended as a unit and their overall workrate and organisation. Barca were very individualistic and didn’t appear to be in tune with each other at all. I’m excusing E’too’s performance as he’s still searching for full match fitness but Ronaldinho was absolutely awful. It bodes well for Celtic.

39

Barca never looked a threat. As Gerry Armstrong said Pepe had some game. Never heard of him really but looked very solid at the back. Casillas did well when called upon. Messi was really missed today. Whats wrong with him? He seems to be injured a lot.

40

Thigh strain - he’ll be out for a month apparently. He’s their main man now with Ronaldinho struggling and they missed him terribly.