Jamezinho
Golden Boot Winner
He's already at a big club.
Champions League 2011/12
- Thread starter nikolapfc89
- Start date
He's already at a big club.
Ronaldinho_23
Premiership
great bayern, I LOVE YOU FOREVER !!!!
PLF
Legend
- 2 August 2004
Yep. Doesn't really get any bigger than Bayern.
I'm sure Bayern have no interest in selling him nor would he want to leave. Especially being an Austrian and having come through the academy.
Not to mention his value is now through the roof after 2nd half of the season, so very few could afford him as well.
Valon
Banned
I dont really like bayern at all but when they go to penalty i was hoping they win it coz they deserve , all tho on 120 i was more for real 
gerd
Retired Footballer
A well deserved win for Bayern.
Just like PLF said, Real were only better in the last 30 minutes.
In the first 180 they dominated Real.
Gutted for Alaba, should never had a yellow for that handsball which was not a deliberate one. I was very impressed with him trhougout both matches: this is one hell of a player with enormous guts. He kept on attacking and then stepped up to take the first penalty and scored it coolly.
Well, no classico in the final...i can watch now...
I don't care who wins but will end up supporting Chelsea because of my daughter.
I've said from the beginning of the season that Bayern is the team that comes close to both Spanish giants.
And now that i've seen bot Barcelona and Madrid, i wonder if they are not overrated.
Madrid went out against the first strong opponent they encountered in this CL. They won the classico against Barcelona but were dominated throughout. IMO too much was made about their win in the classico. Basically they played like Chelsea, parking the bus (i know they counterattacked more than Chelsea).
Barcelona look a bit like a teethless lion. Fantastic passing game, lots of skill, but not enough danger in it.
Bayern were immense yesterday, but IMO they can play even better. IMO Kroos had not his best match yesterday.
Just like PLF said, Real were only better in the last 30 minutes.
In the first 180 they dominated Real.
Gutted for Alaba, should never had a yellow for that handsball which was not a deliberate one. I was very impressed with him trhougout both matches: this is one hell of a player with enormous guts. He kept on attacking and then stepped up to take the first penalty and scored it coolly.
Well, no classico in the final...i can watch now...
I don't care who wins but will end up supporting Chelsea because of my daughter.
I've said from the beginning of the season that Bayern is the team that comes close to both Spanish giants.
And now that i've seen bot Barcelona and Madrid, i wonder if they are not overrated.
Madrid went out against the first strong opponent they encountered in this CL. They won the classico against Barcelona but were dominated throughout. IMO too much was made about their win in the classico. Basically they played like Chelsea, parking the bus (i know they counterattacked more than Chelsea).
Barcelona look a bit like a teethless lion. Fantastic passing game, lots of skill, but not enough danger in it.
Bayern were immense yesterday, but IMO they can play even better. IMO Kroos had not his best match yesterday.
Enzo
International
So when it comes to most important games in the end Messi and Ronaldo fail, this only shows their human nature.. Pep and Mou learn this for a next season - EVEN THE GREATEST GET TIRED!
Im happy that Real didnt' go through, i hate that team and many players.. so I feel very sorry for excellent Casillias and always brave Alonso. Mourinho magic didnt' work, Benzema was absolutely pathetic..Neuer amazing! Robben did miss one chance again.. what is happening with him? I mean even the penalty wasent really good, poor Casillias was just a bit unlucky...
Ramos & Ronaldo fail of the match. Ronaldo it dosent matter if you score 2 goals(then make 4-5 uncomplete passes) it matter most when you score imporant goals.. and your freekicks were very very poor.
Eagerly awaiting EURO2012 and summer transfer window
Btw Spanish football seems a bit overestimated, despite Europa League Spain/Portugal semi-finals invasion..
Also consider this:
Bayern - Real on tuesday, Chelsea - Barcelona on wednesday, on saturday Barca - Real, on tuesday Barcelona - Chelsea, on wednesday Real - Bayern.. This is end of the long long season.. inside a week 3 very important and hard matches for both teams.. while Real - Barcelona bash themselves last saturday, Bayern was already waiting for Real as it lost crown to Dortmund, Chelsea had a game against Arsenal, but afaik they had almost second team playing..
Im happy that Real didnt' go through, i hate that team and many players.. so I feel very sorry for excellent Casillias and always brave Alonso. Mourinho magic didnt' work, Benzema was absolutely pathetic..Neuer amazing! Robben did miss one chance again.. what is happening with him? I mean even the penalty wasent really good, poor Casillias was just a bit unlucky...
Ramos & Ronaldo fail of the match. Ronaldo it dosent matter if you score 2 goals(then make 4-5 uncomplete passes) it matter most when you score imporant goals.. and your freekicks were very very poor.
Eagerly awaiting EURO2012 and summer transfer window
Btw Spanish football seems a bit overestimated, despite Europa League Spain/Portugal semi-finals invasion..
Also consider this:
Bayern - Real on tuesday, Chelsea - Barcelona on wednesday, on saturday Barca - Real, on tuesday Barcelona - Chelsea, on wednesday Real - Bayern.. This is end of the long long season.. inside a week 3 very important and hard matches for both teams.. while Real - Barcelona bash themselves last saturday, Bayern was already waiting for Real as it lost crown to Dortmund, Chelsea had a game against Arsenal, but afaik they had almost second team playing..
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Enzo
International
Real was really bad this season to be honest.. Ajax, Lyon, Zagreb, APOEL, CSKA? Cmon first top team and they are out, Barcelona at least played against Milan 4 times this season + Santos + Porto.. Real did play only against Barcelona all the time..
gerd
Retired Footballer
An interesting article about the suspensions in the final (from the Guardian's website):
Anyone who wants a glimpse into the suffering that accompanies missing a Champions League final need only look back at that moment, just a few minutes after the exhilaration of the final whistle, when the Sky interviewer Geoff Shreeves informs an unknowing Branislav Ivanovic that his only role in Munich on 19 May will be as an onlooker. Ivanovic clearly has no idea. At first, he doesn't grasp why Shreeves is asking about his booking and then there is that excruciating moment when it finally registers.
"You know that means you're out of the final?" Shreeves asks. "I don't," Ivanovic says, and he smiles. But this is the awkward smile people put on when receiving bad news and they do not want to believe it is true. There is unmistakable shock and his face changes.
Raul Meireles and Ramires will be experiencing something similar and it will only intensify when they get to Bavaria and the euphoria we saw in Barcelona on Tuesday has passed. It is a sense of helplessness, you imagine, with many other emotions: self-pity, embarrassment, awkwardness.
Maybe a little anger, too, because it is surely time the men at Uefa looked at the mechanics of its disciplinary system and asked themselves whether some of these offences really justify a footballer – or in this case, footballers plural – missing out on what could be the biggest match of their lives. Bayern Munich, too, will have three players unavailable for being shown two yellow cards: David Alaba, Luiz Gustavo and Holger Badstuber.
The only logical conclusion is that the punishment far outweighs the crime when, for instance, you study the lunacy of John Terry delivering his knee into the back of Alexis Sánchez's legs for a clear red card and then compare that with the case of Ramires, booked three times in 10 Champions League appearances and now facing the same punishment as the club captain. Ramires played with an energy and drive at Camp Nou that made it feel like he, too, may not have understood that his yellow card – for complaining to the Turkish referee, Cuneyt Cakir, – meant he was suspended from the final.
If he was aware, it was a performance of remarkable selflessness and there will be a lot of sympathy for the Brazilian, along with Meireles and Ivanovic, over the next few weeks. Ivanovic is another with 10 Champions League appearances this season and his yellow card, for scuffing the penalty spot with his studs, just before Lionel Messi's missed spot-kick, was only his third of the competition, the others coming in the second leg of the quarter-final against Benfica and the group match against Bayer Leverkusen in November. Meireles has already served a one-match ban on the back of two bookings in the group stages and a third in the last-16 match against Napoli. Another yellow followed in the first leg against Benfica but, as serial offending goes, it is hardly a bulging portfolio of indiscretions.
The three players, along with Terry, were "devastated", to use the word Mikel John Obi applied. "The yellow cards should be cancelled going into a final," the midfielder claimed. "Uefa should look into that." But it won't happen and to give Uefa its due, it is not easy to know what it should do.
The organisation is aware from its annual Elite Club Coaches Forum that some of the leading managers want a change but no better alternative has ever been proposed and, while an amnesty at the semi-final stage would be popular with many people once we reach the semi-finals, Uefa's response is that it would simply open it to accusations of removing discipline and not protecting the players. It does, after all, have a duty to ensure there is fair play and in the case of the Chelsea Four, there are valid reasons not to blame only the system. Uefa can hardly be at fault, for instance, for the fact that Ivanovic did not realise the significance of his yellow-card count, or that nobody from Chelsea thought to point it out, or double-check.
All the same, it is difficult to look at the players who have missed out on finals through these rules and not think it is unfeasibly harsh, particularly in these days when there are so many bookings for innocuous offences, enforced by trigger-happy referees.
A few years ago it was possible to put together a full XI of players who had experienced the kind of bittersweet emotions that meant Roy Keane ("I didn't deserve it") and Paul Scholes ("I would have been happy to stay in the dressing room") had to be cajoled into collecting winners' medals after the 1999 final. It was some team, too, including Franco Baresi (1994), Pavel Nedved (2003) and Dani Alves (2009). The captain of Suspended XI? That would be Alessandro Costacurta, the poor so-and-so who missed out on both the European Cup and World Cup finals in 1994.
Never before, though, have both Champions League finalists lost three players to the system. Throw in Terry and the sent-off Darren Fletcher missing the final in 2009, as well as Ian Wright in the 1994 European Cup Winners' Cup, and there is almost an entire team made up of players who have helped English clubs to finals and then taken a seat in the stands.
Anyone who wants a glimpse into the suffering that accompanies missing a Champions League final need only look back at that moment, just a few minutes after the exhilaration of the final whistle, when the Sky interviewer Geoff Shreeves informs an unknowing Branislav Ivanovic that his only role in Munich on 19 May will be as an onlooker. Ivanovic clearly has no idea. At first, he doesn't grasp why Shreeves is asking about his booking and then there is that excruciating moment when it finally registers.
"You know that means you're out of the final?" Shreeves asks. "I don't," Ivanovic says, and he smiles. But this is the awkward smile people put on when receiving bad news and they do not want to believe it is true. There is unmistakable shock and his face changes.
Raul Meireles and Ramires will be experiencing something similar and it will only intensify when they get to Bavaria and the euphoria we saw in Barcelona on Tuesday has passed. It is a sense of helplessness, you imagine, with many other emotions: self-pity, embarrassment, awkwardness.
Maybe a little anger, too, because it is surely time the men at Uefa looked at the mechanics of its disciplinary system and asked themselves whether some of these offences really justify a footballer – or in this case, footballers plural – missing out on what could be the biggest match of their lives. Bayern Munich, too, will have three players unavailable for being shown two yellow cards: David Alaba, Luiz Gustavo and Holger Badstuber.
The only logical conclusion is that the punishment far outweighs the crime when, for instance, you study the lunacy of John Terry delivering his knee into the back of Alexis Sánchez's legs for a clear red card and then compare that with the case of Ramires, booked three times in 10 Champions League appearances and now facing the same punishment as the club captain. Ramires played with an energy and drive at Camp Nou that made it feel like he, too, may not have understood that his yellow card – for complaining to the Turkish referee, Cuneyt Cakir, – meant he was suspended from the final.
If he was aware, it was a performance of remarkable selflessness and there will be a lot of sympathy for the Brazilian, along with Meireles and Ivanovic, over the next few weeks. Ivanovic is another with 10 Champions League appearances this season and his yellow card, for scuffing the penalty spot with his studs, just before Lionel Messi's missed spot-kick, was only his third of the competition, the others coming in the second leg of the quarter-final against Benfica and the group match against Bayer Leverkusen in November. Meireles has already served a one-match ban on the back of two bookings in the group stages and a third in the last-16 match against Napoli. Another yellow followed in the first leg against Benfica but, as serial offending goes, it is hardly a bulging portfolio of indiscretions.
The three players, along with Terry, were "devastated", to use the word Mikel John Obi applied. "The yellow cards should be cancelled going into a final," the midfielder claimed. "Uefa should look into that." But it won't happen and to give Uefa its due, it is not easy to know what it should do.
The organisation is aware from its annual Elite Club Coaches Forum that some of the leading managers want a change but no better alternative has ever been proposed and, while an amnesty at the semi-final stage would be popular with many people once we reach the semi-finals, Uefa's response is that it would simply open it to accusations of removing discipline and not protecting the players. It does, after all, have a duty to ensure there is fair play and in the case of the Chelsea Four, there are valid reasons not to blame only the system. Uefa can hardly be at fault, for instance, for the fact that Ivanovic did not realise the significance of his yellow-card count, or that nobody from Chelsea thought to point it out, or double-check.
All the same, it is difficult to look at the players who have missed out on finals through these rules and not think it is unfeasibly harsh, particularly in these days when there are so many bookings for innocuous offences, enforced by trigger-happy referees.
A few years ago it was possible to put together a full XI of players who had experienced the kind of bittersweet emotions that meant Roy Keane ("I didn't deserve it") and Paul Scholes ("I would have been happy to stay in the dressing room") had to be cajoled into collecting winners' medals after the 1999 final. It was some team, too, including Franco Baresi (1994), Pavel Nedved (2003) and Dani Alves (2009). The captain of Suspended XI? That would be Alessandro Costacurta, the poor so-and-so who missed out on both the European Cup and World Cup finals in 1994.
Never before, though, have both Champions League finalists lost three players to the system. Throw in Terry and the sent-off Darren Fletcher missing the final in 2009, as well as Ian Wright in the 1994 European Cup Winners' Cup, and there is almost an entire team made up of players who have helped English clubs to finals and then taken a seat in the stands.
In all honesty Zee I don't like the way they play. Of course I like their passing and technique, but what I don't like is overdoing it. There's no unpredictability in their game imo. I am one who never watches any of their games anymore. I didn't watch any of their games this season, apart from their 2nd leg with Chelsea in CL. They really do bore me mate. I'm one who always like to see mixing style, and not just depend on one style. I can't watch something knowing the outcome already. It's like watching a re-run.
I really liked Barca in the 90's, 00's, up until Ronaldinho's. I enjoyed Romario's, Stoichkov's, Koeman's, Luis Enrique's, Guardiola's, Dutch's (when once almost most of the team were made up of the Dutch team), Kluivert's, Rivaldo's, Ronaldinho's, Deco's etc Barca. But this team, something about them turned me off completely. I don't follow them anymore.
Bayern play every 4 days in last 8 weeks.
Topaz
Programmer/TheAwesomeGem
Chelsea should play their reserve for the stupid UFEA rule.
bebo
Looking for a Manager
How daft is that for players not to know their sitting on a suspension before kick off. The commentators mention each players who will miss the next match ,before and during the match as well. You would think the club who pays millions on their players to give them a heads up.
zeemeister
foxy engine
Tactic by the coach maybe to not deter them from committing to the tackle? I dunno what to make of the rule. You can't even slide or bodycheck anymore and handballs are a complete lottery. Just go back to the days of if it hits your hand its a foul and that's it.
Jamezinho
Golden Boot Winner
I totally agree Lami.
Barca undoubtedly play the best one touch passing game in the world, but their play style is very one dimensional, repetitive and subsequently boring (to me). It's devastatingly effective 95% of the time but they have no 'Plan B'. I think they need to look at bringing in some players that give them options to play a different way.
That's why I enjoy watching Real Madrid over Barca. They have a more dynamic mix of players and, hence, their play style is more varied and versatile. They have players like Ronaldo, Benzema, Higuain, Ozil, etc.....who are physically strong yet technical players. They can play the quick passing possession game or go more direct if they need to. They can go up against big, physical teams no problem.
I know Barca's style is often cited as the model for the way the game should be played but sometimes I feel they need to be more pragmatic and that means bringing in some players that can help them win with a more direct or physical style if they need to.
we7god
Kreisklassen-Profi
gerd
Retired Footballer
Robben is a bit like Cristiano Ronaldo then?
- Staff
- #1,369
You know, there are a lot of contenders, but that may be the worst penalty technique I've seen in a major shoot-out. I mean, everything - body shape, leaning back, the run up - it's f(cking woeful.
Anyway, all credit to Bayern. Hosting a CL final! Not bad eh!
Anyway, all credit to Bayern. Hosting a CL final! Not bad eh!
airjoca
International
I have to warn my german friends who are fans of Bayern:
The referee in the final, Pedro Proença, has a LONG history of benefiting Blue teams over Red teams.
You have been warned...
The referee in the final, Pedro Proença, has a LONG history of benefiting Blue teams over Red teams.
You have been warned...
I have to warn my german friends who are fans of Bayern:
The referee in the final, Pedro Proença, has a LONG history of benefiting Blue teams over Red teams.
You have been warned...
i know, he was referee on last two games what Bayern lost at home.
PLF
Legend
- 2 August 2004
Which games were those?
I have to warn my german friends who are fans of Bayern:
The referee in the final, Pedro Proença, has a LONG history of benefiting Blue teams over Red teams.
You have been warned...
harryhausen
League 1
- 20 July 2010
First was a match against Bordeaux (0-2) in 2009 group stage and the second the one against Inter (2-3) last year in round of 16.
PLF
Legend
- 2 August 2004
Yeah, both teams have key players out but I'd say Chelsea are worse off as they're missing even more players and ones that can't be replaced such as Ramires who's been easily their best player for awhile now.
PLF
Legend
- 2 August 2004
Can't wait for tomorrow's DIVE-mania Final! With Oscar worthy candidates such as Didier Drogba, Ribery and Robben all in the same pitch, we will surely have our fair share of 'theatrics' and hopefully one or two deserved 'yellow' cards for exaggeration as well.
PLF
Legend
- 2 August 2004
Only 12 hours away now from the FINALE! Am I the only one excited!? 
Zeem
Wonder Boy
- 15 July 2006
- AC Milan
It seems like a while now that I've watched a football match but I'll get excited 2 hours from the final.
I predict Bayern winning. In front of their crowd, they will be hard to stop.
I predict Bayern winning. In front of their crowd, they will be hard to stop.
