Barca are really turning up the heat, chances thick and fast now!

1-0 Real! Ronaldo (102, extra time)

Barcelona 0 - 1 Real Madrid

 

So far, I got all the results right! Barça will beat Real in the UCL tie.

it is exactly one year since mourinho defeated barca with inter.

:(

 

Pedro's goal should've counted. When it's so close like that, the benefit of the doubt should go to the offensive player.

At 8 secs Real drop the cup off the bus. :laugh3:

 

[ame=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dHJ5EzXjVJI]YouTube - REAL MADRID DROPS COPA DEL REY TROPHY[/ame]

Sergio Ramos is such an idiot. :facepalm:

 

Well played Real!

but Ramos said on his twitter that the cup jumped off when it arrived in Cibeles and saw so many madridistas. :laugh3:

 

 

seriously though, still really sad about the defeat :( but i thought RM played really well last night, especially during the first half. oh well.

yeah last night wasn´t one of the best nights for Barça... :(

i hope that change in Champions :)

Well done to Madrid for winning the League Cup after 18 years.

 

Barca to smash them in the champs league

Well done to Madrid for winning the League Cup after 18 years.

 

Barca to smash them in the champs league

This.

 

:shocked2::shocked2:

 

Pep Guardiola riled by Jose Mourinho jibes

 

Barcelona coach Pep Guardiola has lost his cool with Real Madrid counterpart Jose Mourinho ahead of their Champions League semi-final.

 

Before the first leg, Mourinho mischievously said Guardiola was a new breed of coach who criticised correct decisions by referees.

 

In an unusual outburst for the normally laid-back Guardiola, the Spaniard retorted: "He's the [expletive] boss. He's the [expletive] master and I can't compete with him at any instant."

 

Real beat their great rivals 1-0 in last week's final of the Copa del Rey, but Barcelona have all-but won the Spanish League, sitting eight points clear of Mourinho's side with five games to play. Experienced German official Wolfgang Stark will be the referee the Champions League match at the Bernabeu.

 

But before Stark was named, Guardiola said Mourinho would be "super happy" if his fellow Portuguese Pedro Proenca had been chosen. To which Mourinho said: "Besides the naming of the referee and the pressure that they exerted that it was not Proenca, the most important thing is that we are in new cycle.

 

"Up to now we have had two types of coaches. A very small group of coaches who never speak to the referees. After that, there is a bigger group, of whom I am one, who criticise the referees when they make huge errors. But it is also a group who are happy to highlight the good work of the referee. And now, with the declaration of Pep the other day, we are entering a new era with a third group, which for the moment includes only him, who criticise the correct decision of the referee. This is something I have never seen in the world of football."

 

Mourinho was referring to a goal by Barcelona's Pedro Rodriguez which was disallowed for offside in the Spanish Cup final - a decision criticised by Guardiola but which video replays showed was a correct call by the referee.

 

The pair previously spent four years together at Barcelona - Guardiola as a player and Mourinho as an assistant coach in the 1990s. And an angry Guardiola continued: "Because Mr Mourinho used my name directly I will do the same. Away from the pitch he has had the upper hand so I award him his own personal Champions League for that. We worked together for four years. He knows me and I know him and that's what I will remember and focus on. It leaves a bad taste when someone you have worked with believes what he reads rather than you. If you think I complain about referees then great, there is nothing I can do."

 

Aside from the pre-match mind games, Mourinho believes Real Madrid's recent success against Barcelona will count for little in the Champions League tie. "I don't have a magic potion. We're not favourites, there exists no favourite," said Mourinho. It's between two teams that know each other, two teams with tradition, two teams who have won big games before."

 

Real, who have won European football's most sought-after trophy a record nine times, are playing in their first Champions League semi-final since 2003, while rivals Barcelona are in the last four for the fourth successive year. Last year, the Catalan side were beaten over two legs by a Mourinho-coached Inter Milan, who went on to win the trophy. And Mourinho is aiming to become the first man to guide three different teams to the title, having won the competition for the first time with Porto in 2004.

 

However, he is refusing to get carried away with thoughts of reaching the final at Wembley. I'm the same coach, the exact same, that lost 5-0 against Barcelona six months ago," he said. "Every game has its own story."

 

Real returned to the Mestalla, the scene of their Cope del Rey triumph, on Saturday to take on Valencia in La Liga and, despite fielding a weakened side, routed the third-placed side 6-3. Meanwhile, Barca were less convincing in beating relegation-threatened Osasuna 2-0 at the Nou Camp.

 

Guardiola conceded: "We are not going [to Madrid] in the best condition but in mental terms we will travel to the Bernabeu with a lot of enthusiasm. We accept that Madrid are favourites, they have earned that in the last few weeks, and we'll try to turn that around."

 

Barcelona are looking frail at the back with left-backs Eric Abidal, Maxwell and Adriano all definitely missing, although influential skipper Carles Puyol and centre-back Gabriel Milito have recovered from injuries in time to play.

 

http://news.bbc.co.uk/sport1/hi/football/13197088.stm

This will be intresting !

A win for the dark side

Craig Foster

April 24, 2011

 

Perhaps it was the wait - three years between trophies, to be precise, an interminably long time when your fiercest rival is painting the world with brush strokes of genius. Or perhaps because this was redemption. Maybe that's why Real Madrid defender Sergio Ramos did something unthinkable last week.

 

Real Madrid had just won the Copa del Rey by beating the team that had been as close to unbeatable as any club for the past 50 years. The 1-0 win over Barcelona, a side rated in the top two or three in the history of football, clearly proved too much for Ramos, whose grasp on the King's Cup while riding the open-top deck of the team bus lasted only until the famed Cibeles fountain - the traditional ceremonial gathering place where the madridista tribe celebrate great victories of war - came into view. He dropped the trophy.

 

Then the bus ran over the cup and it reportedly shattered into pieces. In recent times this would have been symbolic of the ability of Madrid, the greatest club in the history of the European Cup and the world's richest, to falter at the very moment when it should prosper the most.

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This is the club, after all, which sacked Vicente del Bosque in 2003, immediately following its 29th league title and a year after the club's ninth Champions League triumph because, at least in part, he was not marketable enough - too humble for a club where image is everything.

 

Marketing over substance became the millstone around the neck of Florentino Perez, the president who built the ''Los Galacticos'' era only to see it crumble and who returned for another tilt. This time, though, he had learnt his lesson. He signed yet another star - an individual acknowledged to be the best of the best, the master of his domain - except it was a coach, not a player.

 

Perez had learned that even with the best talent on the park, it is the work and leadership off it that makes the difference, and so he set out to lure the one coach who seemingly could conjure success from any circumstance: Jose Mourinho. A football alchemist, a man able to manoeuvre players at his disposal in a mighty game of strategy and to manipulate their minds to build an unshakeable belief they are part of another great Mourinho triumph.

 

The Portuguese antagonist is a coach who feels comfortable on the alternate side of conventional wisdom. He loves being the contrarian and he turned around a Chelsea club that simply could not believe it was capable of winning.

 

He then strode to Italy and seized the treble, along the way thumbing his nose at all and sundry in Italian football. But he did this while building an extraordinary bond with his players, whom he protects from anything and anyone. Now he's protecting his charges from the great former Barcelona player and manager Johan Cruyff, who attacked Mourinho's tactics after Real and Barcelona drew 1-1 in the domestic league. Mourinho has become Cruyff's antithesis, the manufacturer of results by any means.

 

Cruyff was majestic as a player and finds the dark arts employed by Mourinho and his teams repugnant - the professional fouls, the aggression, the win-at-all-costs mentality that turns football into a battlefield on which one may emerge victorious, but the game itself is tarnished.

 

Compare him with Mourinho: the self-correcting football computer, free of the bonds of philosophy or aesthetics, whose every decision is made only with the result in mind. He is ever learning and evolving. After being humiliated by five goals at the Camp Nou in November, he changed. After a 1-1 draw at the Bernabeu, he adapted. The result? Victory in the Copa del Rey. He is a software programmer for football success, a football terminator - relentless.

 

You might not enjoy his football, and I do not, nor agree with his methods, and I cannot, but you must respect his ability to bend the game to his will and to carry even the greatest club on his shoulders.

 

Next up is another battle against Barcelona. The prize is a spot in the Champions League final. Black against white, light against dark, the creators against the destroyers, Pep Guardiola's humility and art against Mourinho's anti-football. The ideological football war resumes this week. I wouldn't miss it for the world.

 

unlike this biased writer i honestly don't give a damn about the way mourinho plays the game. as long he disposes of barca at the end of it i will be happy.

HT Real 0-0 Barca

 

What an embarrassment for football that was, played like nancy boys the lot of them. Whoever makes the final and plays (probably) Man Utd I hope they get kicked to death and then they'll know they've been in a real match!

I've turned over to the snooker. Really poor stuff.

FT Real Madrid 0 - 2 Barcelona

 

And I can almost hear the sound of my own awesomeness :smug: :P

Pep > Mourinho

Messi's 2nd. Guapa.

UEFA has announced that both appeals by Real Madrid and Barcelona have been rejected.

 

too much drama. :bomb::bomb:

http://www.sport.es/es/noticias/barca/20110502/abidal-convocado/991723.shtml

 

ERIC ABIDAL BACK IN THE LINEUP. Great news!!!!

 

Iniesta is healthy as well :D

http://www.sport.es/es/noticias/barca/20110502/abidal-convocado/991723.shtml

 

ERIC ABIDAL BACK IN THE LINEUP. Great news!!!!

 

Iniesta is healthy as well :D

 

That is great news about Abidal. Great news indeed.

Both Madrid & Barca lost in the league this week :stunned:

Both Madrid & Barca lost in the league this week :stunned:

 

All semifinalists (inc ManUnited and Schalke) lost this week. :P