The most magnificent monotony in the whole world: La Primera División 11/12

Real Madrid are the favourites for the Supercopa. I think they'll win the first leg 5-0. They will then finish the tie with a 3-1 away win. Real Madrid have plenty of quality players.

http://i.imgur.com/emsWo.jpg

http://i.imgur.com/Psdey.jpg

http://i.imgur.com/OvGxS.jpg

http://i.imgur.com/6tOto.jpg

Nice.

Do you have the latest on the player strike?

that will probably happen unless the players' union and the divisions come to an agreement, and there's pretty significant disparity right now

the super cup is still on though

http://i.imgur.com/Wnn9L.jpg

looking forward to the first clásico of the season. hope alexis and thiago get a run-out.

Messi

The Argentine striker always wants to play and has not missed any of the last 4 games in Madrid. 4 games to remember and he was decisive in all of them. His 6 goals helped Barça to 3 wins and a draw

5 – All five of Lionel Messi’s goals in the Supercopa have come at the Camp Nou. Domestic

Casillas, Ramos, Pepe, Carvalho, Marcelo, Alonso, Khedira, Di María, Özil, C.Ronaldo i Benzema
Valdés, Alves, Mascherano, Abidal, Adriano, Thiago, Keita, Iniesta, Messi, Alexis i Villa

Not going to try to find detailed match reports from summer friendlies, but has Xavi played in any matches for Barcelona or Spain since the Champions League final?

Nice footwork by Benzema on that goal.

not a friendly afaict

this is pretty boring. real totally dominating.

As bad as De Jong, that, maybe worse.

madrid have been destroying crap teams throughout preseason, guardiola's training schedules aren't really designed for it

nonetheless, 'credit where credit's due' would be the apt cliche

Alves looking shook.

Commentator on my stream said 'golazo' the moment it left Villa's boot, he was not wrong.

villa, fucking hell. wonderful.

feel like he's scored that goal 40 times before but still

take a bow, son.

lol

i wouldn't like to be a madrid player right now. portuguese hairdrier time.

this is quite a game.

callejon looks like a tekken character

he's shit

what was the score though?

2 - 2

http://i.telegraph.co.uk/multimedia/archive/01972/cesc2_1972187c.jpg

Oh, lovely.

what a fucking game so far huh

These two matches so far have been the best ~120min since last spring, so much better than their semifinal.

definitely. real are at least going for it now.

right, next time some cunt comes out with "dani alves is pish" can they just be permabanned. totally picked ronaldo's pocket twice in quick succession there, and had more assists last year in spain than anyone bar xavi and messi.

is mascherano gonna be first choice cb this season? seems weird to me.

not when puyol is fit. or if.

jesus, messi's assist for the BCN goal was incredible

Alves looked really off in the first leg, lot of misplaced passes iirc. Great player though, think his talent is only questioned when he plays as a full midfielder like for Brazil.

jesus, pique's assist for the BCN goal was incredible

Pique on the other hand would probably get 10 goals & 10 assists playing as a CF for Blackburn.

alves is great but abidal's been the outstanding defender today, he's playing a perfect game so far.

abidal is so important to them. maxwell is his backup and just isn't fit to clean his boots.

adriano? i thought they were going to sell maxwell this summer

i feel like maxwell was playing left-back a lot last season, and badly, but i also do not rate adriano, though he's better.

I like Adriano going forward at least. Maxwell hardly got a look in after January iirc? Wish they'd just go to 3-4-3 already.

coentrao is the most ridiculous signing

You could make a great compilation of Madrid players standing useless in the box on possessions like that one.

they are all horrible.

interesting topic, the promoted #2 one. tend to agree it's mostly about the squad & youth coming through.

di matteo not doing too badly, small sample size excepted.

only been #2 there for about 20 mins tbf, tho on that track avram grant was better than they care to admit

im sure rossell &c were waiting for luis enrique to do something creditable and promising with roma but that whole 'project' seems to have run aground

the appt of villanova might be taking barcelonaism a little too far, and he isnt going to get much of a hearing if he starts off like guardiola did in his first few games

guardiola wasn't just a barca b coach tho. He had the whole aura with the players of being, y'know, guardiola. Which is why I thought they may go for Enrique.

they probably should have but for some reason Enrique still looks untouchable. guardiola at inter would be a hilarious disaster I'm sure, possibly even a worse match than at cfc. go for Swansea imo.

fyi anyone at inter would be a hilarious disaster. they are flat broke with a team 5 years older and less caring (or brave i guess) than chelseas. no-one is suddenly going to make forlan the worlds best striker in 2013.

my hope with pep is he maradonas and tries to prove himself at a 'lesser' club. maradona left barca for napoli and won them the title. could pep do it with swansea or brescia or england? does he want an actual challange, or will he just regret leaving the worlds two best players behind?

i think the 'actual challenge' stuff can be given a rest, guardiola put everything into barcelona the last four years

just cuz sam allardyce could probably have won a title with them doesnt mean peps 3/4 titles, 2/4 european cups should be diminished

and thats only half the argument, he was manager of the best side yet assembled, who have taken pass-and-move determnism to new extremes

its doubtful they would have been quite so special in the hands of another manager with lesser convictions

im not saying that he isnt a great manager, he has done something special. i just think he has a rare opportunity for another 'project', something to show he can be one of the truly best managers ever.

a manager should be graded on, amongst other things, how much more wins, success and joy he brings a team that may not have deserved it. i.e. fergie could be seen to be so great because he wins league titles with a team that might not be better than 4th, or lambert can get a third division team to the premiership midtable etc. as great as pep's evolution of tactics has been, i can't really tell how much he has added to a team w/ messi in it and would like to see what he can instead do with a team w/ steven fletcher instead, ya know?

torres showing signs of life, spain really need him while villa is out

tho there's some suggestion villa is close to returning

So Messi broke Gerd Muller's record then. Ho-hum

hope he gets 50 in the league and next year focuses on retaining energy for the big games

Four more tonight putting Espanyol to the sword.

im going to miss guardiola

i tired a little of his hyperbolic praise for every player but really he has been gracious and intriguing and a damn good manager

messi now has 100 goals or assists this season

villareal down, which im glad about. who wouldve believed that a year ago when they finished 4th. malaga in the champions league spots. levante in europa also wouldve seemed highly improbable start of the season.

why so glad about villareal? they used to play some awesome stuff, probably the last team to win against barcelona by properly outplaying them circa 2k8, 2k9 when they had pires, cazorla etc

ambivalent about malaga rly, will wait and see

wonder what will happen to giuseppi rossi. cut rate move to juve or something i guess.

i guess maybe not, he's going to be out almost all of next season

they were always such a well run team

even with financial straitening, getting relegated is a fucking disaster

villareal thing: they're a nouveau riche club who essentially were a provincial team playing in the regional leagues until about 20 years ago. their rise is linked to a confluence of investment from local businessmen and local government in the valencian community, e.g. their training ground and reconstruction on el madrigal was paid for by the state. their president since 1998 fernando roig is personal friends with this guy carlos fabra: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/jan/10/spanish-politician-accused-megalomania-monument theyve also supplanted the more traditional team from that area, castellón, who play their football around 8km from villareal. altho castellón also received grants as well, and their former president antonion bonet was similarly chummy with/implicated in the corruption of fabra.

oh yeah and rayo vallecano got their first win in 7 matches (previous 6 games ended in defeat iirc) in the 92nd minute to dump villareal out of the league, and rayo is my spanish team of choice :)

that sort of vaguely undue closeness between local govt and fitba ppl is de rigeur in spain, at least roig makes toilets rather than collapsible apartments

local grandees buying some shitty lil team and primping it up for the top div (wigan, hoffenheim) is all a bit quaint in the era of city, psg, malaga

oh wow i'd heard villareal went down, but:

In the final weeks, Villarreal passed up chance after chance to clinch survival, paying for over-caution, inviting trouble. Waiting for the whistle was waiting to be hit. Bad luck only goes so far in explaining failure. Falcao scored in the 89th minute, costing them a draw that would have kept them safe. Last week, Jonas scored in the 92nd minute costing them a draw that would have kept them safe and provoking a confrontation because Valencia, those dirty cheats, had tried to win when they had nothing to play for – a confrontation that speaks volumes about what's wrong with Spanish football. Two weeks before that, a Raúl García equaliser in the 72nd minute cost them a victory, the week before that Carlos Vela scored an 87th‑minute equaliser for Real Sociedad and the week before that Lautaro Acosta's 93rd‑minute equaliser cost them against Racing Santander. In March they lost to Getafe, Levante and Zaragoza: in all three games they conceded late on – in the 72nd, 92nd and 85th and 93rd minutes respectively.

that just sounds horrific

villareal, monaco, leeds, fiorentina, juventus: any more?

what's the big deal about bilbao again? Barca up 3-0 inside 30 minutes

ha i forgot abt this

they conform to the xavi prescription for opposition teams -- play like barcelona, just not as well, then lose and preferably praise barcelona in doing so

73 goals in all competitions

yeah well it's all very well laying it to ynahtid, then failing vs the big teams

some cunts are going to waste a fortune on llorente

javi is the only player in this side ready to step up right now, iker maybe in a couple of years, ander maybe

Those sound like replicas of actual players, hawked by shysters sailing close to the copyright wind

bilbao is a bielsa team and thus plays attractive, pressing, attacking football. sort of like barceona but more vertical. like all bielsa teams they're pretty fucking open because his philosophy entails the majority of the players participating in the team's attacks, leaving them susceptible to the counter-attack. another weakness is that they're bilbao and thus are restricted to only playing basque* players, so the squad isnt amazing. a case of the bias for attacking football vs effective football i guess (bielsa has been p "unlucky" when it's came to silverware) i suppose. a bias i myself carry too. also i can't not love bielsa for his spell as the manager of chile, and for his antics.

*their definition of basque player is fairly wide.

id like to see bielsa and pulis doing some sort of scholastic exchange program

coach swap.

llorente is a bit of an anachronism really isn't he. he's just a big lump of a centre forward. nothing false about this nine.

This match is a perfect example of how I watch football these days: turn on late, foreign game, dead rubber, no investment in the result, volume down, random spotify playlist over the top (tonight: bowie), untouched work spread on desk, posting unread and irrelevant musings to ilx.

footballing ennui. ive stopped watching games in that fashion, dont derive enjoyment from it. i knew this was on but missed the start and after i twigged it was 3-0 already i decided not to watch it.

might tune in for the celebrations, say goodbye to dearest pep.

you would have an investment in the result if llorente scored a fourteen minute hat-trick now

i like alexis sanchez

footballing ennui

It's true. I've been struggling with the slog for a while now. Partly it's diminishing returns, partly it's following a team who aren't throwing out sparks recently. In fairness I've also been spoiled by happening on an excellent run of things-at-stake games - Europa League, Milan derby, the last three Montpellier games - so it's not all like that.

I need to take a complete break 'til the Euros I think. Magnificent monotony indeed.

all i could do was sigh deeply when i realised the euros were in 2 weeks

spose the prem season was unusually delirious tho tbf

RIP Manuel Preciado http://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/0/football/18351455

aw that sucks.

life can be so cruel.