by Sabre » Sat Dec 30, 2006 2:50 pm
To be honest Larsson, yesteryear I thought Barcelona had a worse squad than this year. Meaning that I saw a weak point for instance in Oleguer. Typical player that is maintained in the club just to remain that they're a catalan club, as it is a little shame not to have local players. Not good enough, and slow.
When Rijkaard in summer said that he didn't need much of reinforcements but a couple in the defence, I thought he was spot on. THe working machine just needed a couple of adjustements. And the players that they bought seemed to be more than ok for this purpose. Zambrotta and THuram evidently improves the RB and Centre Back positions much more than what Oleguer did.
Marquez is a great centre back. It's very difficult to be the centre back or defensive midfielder of Barcelona. Players like Xavi and Ronaldinho do not press much, and that means the centre backs must be 100% aware and perfect, and the defensive midfielder has lots of work to do and often seem to have troubles. That's why Thuram seems to be slow and Motta is shít according to the Barcelona forums. But the truth is, that it's a difficult job the one they have.
Why is Barcelona not impressing that much?
a) Because you have to play little trophies like the one in Japan. It makes you losing games in the liga, games that must be recovered in wednesday, and that means more accumulated tiredness and less time to prepare the games while the opposition has a whole week to prepare them. This problem was suffered by Liverpool yesteryear when they came from Japan too.
b) Because you've had important injuries like the one of Etoo. Gudjohnsen is a good player but provides to the team different things than Etoo does.
All in all, I think Barcelona will be stronger in march and April than they are right now, meaning I don't see a crisis coming from them nor they have big troubles. They just need to gel together a bit. I like late february to play against them. I don't think they're unbeatable especially if they are overconfident-
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