It’s Barcelona Vs Man Utd!
Posted by Joelseah on May 7, 2009
Barcelona knocked Chelsea out of the European Champions league on away goals yesterday despite having only one shot on target for the whole match, and that shot came in the 92nd minute. Unbelievable!
As much as I don’t really like Chelsea, you have to feel sorry for them. Over the two legs, they played a superb controlling game (Aka boring game), and made Barcelona look ordinary. In fact, I took a nap for 30mins of the second half, simply because I was so confident Barcelona will not be able to score.
Those of you who watched the game will know what I mean. Barcelona had plenty of possession, but their passes were all going sideways and backwards instead of forward. Chelsea packed their whole defence till there was almost no gap for all those creative Barcelona players to pick a pass. So much for the pretty football (Maybe the Wimbledon style football could have been more effective)
Anyway, for the record. Chelsea went ahead as early as the 9th minute through a stunning 20 yard volley from Essien. As mentioned, Barcelona had plenty of possession, but it was Chelsea who always looked likelier to score. In fact, they had a couple of penalty appeals turned down (that’s gonna lead to a different discussion altogether).
Barcelona had Abidal sent off for bringing down Anelka as the last defender. Just when we all thought that Chelsea had done enough to secure a win, they momentarily allowed Iniesta room to shoot from outside the penalty box and he made it count with their only shot on target.
That wasn’t the end of the drama though. Chelsea then sent everyone forward (probably regretting all those time wasting they did) and Ballack had a shot right at the death which hit the arm of a Barca player. Again, no penalty was given and it’s understandable that the Chelsea players were furious. After the game, many of them confronted the referee (who had to be escorted), including Drogba, who is probably gonna be in trouble for ranting at the TV camera in front of world TV.
So it’ll be Barcelona against Manchester United in the final in Rome on 27th May. For the purists, I think this is a much better fixture than an all English match which can be seen all the time on BPL.
