Champions League, Group Stage (R)

Well, I'm bummed you guys didn't gain the second spot to advance, would've been nice to see OM instead of Milan make it. It was an interesting, rough match and you guys had your chances. Niang is a very good player, and Taiwo, well, the whole RM forum has been drooling over him for some time now. He looked very sharp and dangerous.

Good luck in Europa Leagu, hopefully you'll have in a good run in that competition.

 

OM can have strong regrets about this match. not that madrid wasn't superior, their victory was logical, but that logic came close to being confounded. if lucho buries his péno there's no telling what would have happened, but i had a strong presentiment marseille would have won... a presentiment as strong as the one telling me lucho would blow the penalty.

you can't blame him any more fully for that (penalties can be missed) than you can credit him for OM's goal (which was down to taiwo's speed). still, lucho was found once again sadly lacking. he's supposed to be a magician that makes things happen, makes his teammates shine, and almost too expectedly we saw the exact opposite: whenever marseille started passing the ball around, all purpose and rhythm disappeareded the moment lucho touched the ball. one excruciatingly bad trap in the first half which turned momentum 180° springs to mind but the best example was iirc correctly minutes before the penalty when heinze (bad sign when your most creative player in the 2nd half is a CB) gave him a beautiful clean ball in the center circle, which he touched once... twice... and gave back to heinze all dirtied up. lucho did do the nice through ball for niang that lead to the penalty, but with all the chaff it was a very thin harvest.

before i go on to my other pets, a word for heinze and niang who as always deserved better, but also taiwo and bonnart. if the last played more matches like that he would be starting for the EdF.

where was i? oh yes, brandao. the most birdbrained player i've ever seen. besides having no clue as to where or when to run, he needs once and for all for someone to explain the rules of the game to him. and show him a compilation of his offsides: he doesn't just mistime his runs, he's always already lined up just where neither defender nor teammate with the ball can really tell if he's offsides but the linesman clearly can. that needlessly wasted a very fine pass... and cancelled a goal.

so who's left? ah, yes; it's been a while since we checked in on le petit matthieu. quite a relief to know he still runs and runs, and occasionally falls down.

last but not least, the stepover princess of madera. she showed her best and her worst last night, but if she could just leave off the sterile showboating i could become a big fan of christiano ronaldo.

the two goals were far from the most important, mandanda helped him not a little bit on the first (closer to his 5,5 than his line when the ball was kicked) and absolutely on the second (give credit where due though, after diawara bowled CR over he was up in a flash and found both ball and goal faster than a certain above-mentioned "striker" could find his own ass with both hands if it was on fire). no, what really impressed me were his two headers, his passing while in motion, and a physical presence that's general both rugged and clean. as much as i hate to say it, he will be ballon d'or again. and again.

 

well, maybe because he had another run-in with the OM staff this weekend. but probably because he's a pile of pants.

 

hey, i loooooved hatem when he was here. for a looooonnng time! but the scales fell from my eyes. my opinion, and widely shared:

a) he's locker room poison
HBA has been unpopular everywhere he's played including clairefontaine and EdF U-16's. at first it wasn't his fault; everyone saying you're the next zidane makes it hard to fit in, but at a certain point you need to look in a mirror.

b) his talent however remarkable is limited to a very narrow register
he is a very good dribbler dans un mouchoir de poche but is neither fleet of foot nor strong of shot. his volume de jeu is liiliputian and he's so poor at heading that i believe he's never even tried it in a match... or even at tennis-ballon.

c) he has no game sense
the conventional take on hatem is that he's selfish, but i don't think that's particularly true. the real problem is that he just doesn't have the intelligence or presence of mind to read play, weigh options and make decisions. his answer to everything is dribble dribble dribble... when he was 14, even when he was 16, he could dribble them all. but that's no longer enough.

d) he has no motivation to correct or improve his performance
his learning curve ended where that of many players' starts. besides gaining some muscle last year he's still the same player he was at 17.

the ben arfa anecdote that i think explains him best is the one just after he arrived at marseille, where he was telling tales about OL being rinkydink, cheating their players out of money on their paychecks, that things were never square... to which faccioli's response was that it was ironic someone so close to their pennies would have forgotten the check for NINETY THOUSAND EUROS the janitors found when cleaning out his locker. he's not a bad kid, but he's just a kid and will never be anything else.

 

yes, he can indeed! but i remain convinced they just fall into his lap, he doesn't really "create" them.