0-0 is always the best result for the home team in the first leg, other than a huge victory. But that probably won't happen. Something like 2-1 is more realistic. Away goals might end being crucial. If it ends up in penalties, I think we have an advantage, even with Navas. Oblak looked clueless last year.
Ughh worst draw for me boring ,butchers again playing out of there lives for the big derby i know they have been shit this year and we have there number in the CL but i think eventually if you keep playing the same team your not going to keep beating them and form goes out the window cup of competitions anything can happen you need some luck too .
I think Pepe's season is done. Maybe we can have Varane, but he probably won't be 100%. Nacho is doing okay. But it'd be nice if Danilo wasn't our only defender on the bench.
I think Varane will be ready. He returned to full training with the team. He probably won't feature in the Clasico, but I bet he will against Deportivo to get some minutes under his belt
That was a the perfect draw for us.juve over two legs would be much more difficult than atleti and monaco are super attacking with too much pace in their forwardline so it would have been unpredictable. And the first leg at home are an advantage for us i feel.just look at the last few seasons.we are better taking a lead in the first leg at the home ground and go play more cautiously at the away ground against a matching team.so I think it is all good
Predictable draw. As I mentioned in another thread no way UEFA want another all Madrid final. Nobody wants to see that. This won't be easy, it's going to be a war of attrition over two legs and Atletico have nothing left to play for in the league. I have a bad feeling about this one, you have to think Atletico will get it right one of these times.
Well there are only three other teams we can draw so it's never going to be that unpredictable. This whole conspiracy about weighted or heated balls is plausible until you consider all the different former players who've taken part in these draws, it means all of them have been in on it, and still to this day not a peep or leaked file coming from them in the slightest.
We are CLEARLY the better side. Unless Oblak somehow manages to pull those miracle saves (something even Neuer couldn't do two games in a row vs us), they are ********ed up. People read too much into the 1-1 game, a game which we dominated from start to finish. If anything, we get to whoop their asses in the Calderon once more before they shut that shithole down.
Yeah seriously, there needs to be some next level collaboration to pull off some these conspiracy theories.
Exactly. The smaller the number of people involved, the more likely a conspiracy is true. The more people involved, the less likely it is. That's why conspiracies regarding 9/11 and other big events are all nonsense, since they are impossible to pull off in the real world. We are perceived as the biggest, most successful club in the world. Fans of other clubs need to find reasons to delegitimize our success, and that's how conspiracy theories about ping pong balls and officiating and Franco appear. And when everything else fails, you can say that, even if we win the CL again, we're a crappy team anyway, as one infamous Barca fan that frequents these forums said the other day.
Betting market odds of advancing for semifinal round: Real Madrid (60%) vs. Atletico Madrid (40%) AS Monaco (30%) vs. Juventus (70%) Overall odds of winning Champions League: Juventus: 36% Real Madrid: 35% Atletico Madrid: 18% AS Monaco: 11% Thus, the favorable draw for Juventus allows them to actually leapfrog us as the new favorites to win the Champions League trophy.
9/11 conspiracy theories genuinely require the collaboration of large amounts of people/institutions , but this wouldn't. The implication is not that every single draw is rigged;it could be one every 3-5 years, and in that case it is very conceivable they could do it. Easy to pull off with a very low probability that anyone would actually investigate it.
As someone said above, it would require the collaboration of former players, a sizable number of UEFA employees, the people who engage in the rigging (those who heat the balls, or whatever), and for all of them to keep silent and never tell their families and friends about it. That's tinfoil hat territory already. Former players aren't trained to keep secrets. If they actually knew that stuff, it would have come out at some party when they're drunk, or they would have told one of their mistresses, etc.
Why would they need to tell every single employee they have? Tampering with the temperature of the balls would hardly require top engineers to fix. I fully understand your scepticism, but UEFA and Fifa are extremely corrupt organisations. Nothing would surprise about the depths they would stoop to for a profit.
Not every single one, but many people in the organization would know about it, or would find out. Yes, they're corrupt, but we know they're corrupt. They're really incompetent at keeping it a secret that they're corrupt. And for them to keep this rigging going on for years, even if it's targeted rigging for certain matchups, and for all the people involved to keep it a secret, highly unlikely. Not saying there's a zero percent chance, but unlikely.
I hear what you guys are saying, but WC host teams have historically gotten easy groups. A little rigging has to be involved
After reading some of ya'll rationale for wanting Pathetico i'm feeling a bit better about this draw. Juve was the one to really avoid right now and Monaco is such a huge threat going forward that they would really give us too much trouble. As compared to both of those teams Atleti is the "easier" draw. We know them. We don't need a lot of prep work to face them. We don't have to travel. We own them, mentally. It will still be super close though. Probably 1 goal or away goals decides this one. Only thing that gives me some anxiety is the law of probability. I mean, they're gonna win one someday, right? In sports we've seen it so many times, teams have to "pay the Gods" in losses and heartache before they are rewarded with titles. Anyway, that's all a bit mystical, lol. I think I read that Juanfran will miss the semifinals. Rafa will definitely play for us. Yup.... in this day and age you can't get 2 people to stay quiet about anything let alone a bunch of people over years about such a scandalous thing as rigging. Its like those people who say the moon landings were fake. Lol. I know a lot of hardened football fans take it for certain that its rigged. I'm not one of them but I know a lot of them who have no doubts about it. I don't know. I can kinda see it happening. It has just enough legs to seem plausible but not really.