What a semi finals we have this year (2013) in the Champions League: Real Madrid will play in Germany in the first leg (24.4) against Dortmund and one day before, Bayern Munich will play with the Messi and his friends in Munich.
The match between Bayern Munich and Barcelona, would be a great opportunity to watch in Pep Guardiola's new team next season. Those teams met in the past 4 years ago in the quarter finals, then Barcelona won in its way to the win of the cup.
In the first leg of two, Barcelona defeated Real Madrid in a typically charged El Clasico matchup, this time played as a Copa Del Rey fixture. The game provided the usual suspense and drama that we’ve come to expect from these rivals although the El Clasico has become a pretty frequent occurrence and with Barcelona constantly a convincing favorite, some have begun to argue that it’s starting to lose a bit of the twinkle it once had.
Christiano Ronaldo provided a positive start for Madrid by putting his team’s first shot on goal in the back of the net. Some uninspired defending by Pique and a slow reaction from Pinto let the man from Portugal put Madrid in the lead, but that goal would provide only a little compensation for what was to come.
Barcelona dominated the game, and if Messi wouldn’t have been as quiet as he was, the final result would have probably been far more devastating.
Madrid held on to their 1-0 lead until the beginning of the second half when Barcelona equalized through an impressive goal from Puyol who charged into the box unchecked to head in a corner.
Driving in the decider, it was Abidal with an unexpected tap-in off a lovely pass flicked over the Real Madrid defense line by Messi. The Bernabeu crowd was far from chuffed.
And so ended yet another Barca triumph…
Will the second leg be played out differently? And if not, could we see a Real Madrid team as Copa Del Rey champions, but without having defeated their arch rivals the entire season?
The Spanish League's opening games have unleashed a wave of criticism from a number of club owners, journalists, and football fans alike. At Camp Nou, Villareal, with a solid line-up, were demolished 5-0 by Barcelona while Madrid crushed Real Zaragoza 6-0, with Zaragoza hardly even able to try their luck with a shot at Madrid's goal.
The criticism is being led by Seville's president Jose Maria del Nido who has invited representatives from 17 Spanish clubs (obviously excluding Barca and Real) to his club's stadium to discuss how to remedy what he's referred to as a league that currently resembles “a piece of crap”.
The focus is being put on the huge amounts of money that the two superteams are taking from the television revenues that the league generates. Real Madrid and Barcelona currently enjoy about half of the total amount which hovers around the £520 million mark per year.
Critics are mostly blaming this huge difference in income as the reason for this extreme imbalance in La Liga, but is that entirely accurate? Of course it's a huge part of it, but credit has to be given to good management. Money isn't enough to build up a great club. This has been proven countless times before in leagues all over the world. If the television revenues are indeed being divided unfairly then this should be analysed and changes should be made accordingly, but we must remember that it's also a natural occurrence for some teams to be more successful than others.
Comparing the Spanish League to the English Premier League also puts things into perspective. Let's go back to 1991. Since then, La Liga has had 5 different teams as champions, but if we look at the English Premier League, we only get 4 teams. Should we be discussing the imbalance in the EPL?
