CHAPTER 166: Barcelona vs Manchester United [analysis]

Positives

• Barcelona was the team that showed up. Manchester United did not.
• When they had the ball, Barça controlled the tempo and distribution better than what Barça have been showing in most of the poor games that Barça played this season.
• Messi, even though came back from injury, showed that he’s still Barça’s most important point of attack.
• With a 0-0 scoreline, even though it’s not the best possible outcome that Barcelona could have gotten from this game, the result means that Barça can afford any scored draw at Old Trafford to get that ticket to Moscow. And the performance showed that Barcelona can be positive of getting a result in Manchester next week.

Negatives

• I believe that a lot of people expected for Man Utd to get a positive result at the Camp Nou to bring back for the 2nd leg, and even some thought that they were going to bulldoze for goals in Barcelona. Instead, it was a showcase of antifootball (Rooney was what, a fullback?). So on a neutral point of view, it wasn’t a spectacle of football between supposedly tow teams emphasizing on attacking football.
• Things could have seriously gone so bad for Barcelona. Milito’s aweful action that resulted in the penalty for the opposition (thank God Ronaldo ‘choked’), and later on when Iniesta made that back pass in which the recipient was Cristiano Ronaldo only for Marquez to squeeze in a tackle and luckily avoid another penalty (besides getting serious potential punishment). The shaky moments are always negatives (more so in this game of magnitude and pressure, all depending on the outcome).
• Even though I stated that the 0-0 score was a positive, it is also a negative. I believe that Barça lost a lot of ground in not having to score, and it could bring to a serious repercussion at Old Trafford. Considering that Barcelona is (and still) having the inability to score, so that’s a risky factor lingering in the outcome of this semi-final.