Recently in Champions League 2009-2010 Category

Cracking start by Tottenham on their CL group stage debut. Gareth Bale just becomes more and more awesome as each match rolls by. He was responsible for the first goal although Petri Pasanen executed it perfectly into his own goal before Peter Crouch got to it. Then it was Crouching Tiger's turn as Van Der Vaart became the Hidden Dragon. It was the Premiership club all over Werder like fungus.

But the German club fought back and just before half time Hugo Almeida glanced the ball past Carlo Cudicini from a curling long cross by Wesley. In the second half, Marko Marin, in the vanguard of the brilliant young German brigade gathered by Joachim Low, with speed and skill finished blisteringly and Werder were level.

A Mikaël Silvestre sighting and by all accounts he did quite well against a club he would be quite familiar with. Harry Redknapp should be quite pleased with the result although there is a feeling that Spurs definitely missed out on a chance to do more damage.

A clean sweep - the first time since the awards were instituted in 1998.

Diego Milito won the footballer of the year and also won the forward of the year.

UEFA Club Forward of the Year: Diego Milito (Inter). Also nominated Lionel Messi (Barcelona), Wayne Rooney (Manchester United).

UEFA Club Midfielder of the Year: Wesley Sneijder (Inter). Also nominated Arjen Robben (Bayern Munich) and Xavi Hernández (Barcelona).

UEFA Club Defender of the Year: Maicon (Inter). Also nominated Lúcio (Inter) and Gerard Piqué (Barcelona).

UEFA Club Goalkeeper of the Year: Júlio César (Inter). Also nominated Hugo Lloris (Lyon) and Víctor Valdés (Barcelona).

I was hoping Manuel Almunia or Lukasz Fabianski would be there too as goalies of the year but the UEFA nominating committee probably missed out on their greatness.

For more past winners >>

Gandalf takes on the vuvuzela......!

Not the most skillful display by the Samba Boys but they have done enough to remain a goal up against the Ivory Coast who look unenterprising.

Its been a lonely vigil for Didier Drogba. He does look out of sorts. Ivory Coast have to step up and get him involved if they want to comeback. One also wonders idly when Eboue will do one of his spectacular tumbles.

A referee familiar to Premiership audiences will take centerstage at the Bernabeu today. Howard Webb will proceed to the World Cup in less than three weeks and officiating this most important match establishes his reputation as one of the top referees in the world.

He has had his share of clashes with Jose Mourinho while at Chelsea including the 2007 Carling Cup which ended in a brawl between the Blues and Arsenal, with John Terry leaving with a broken jaw. Then again, in September 2007 disallowing a Salomon Kalou goal for offside against Blackburn which led to a Mourinho tirade, demanding an apology from the Englishman.

Webb is a former police officer who bears a resemblance to the far more controversial and recently retired Tom Hennings Ovrebo. It the past is any indication, a free flowing match could be impeded by Webb's micromanagement. There will be a smattering of yellow cards and Thiago Motta and Martin Demichelis will be closely watched.

Diego Milito, Maicon, and Wesley Sneijder are all capable of scoring goals but the only one who has scored in a Champions League final out of that group is Samuel Eto'o.

Eto'o's made Arsenal blue in the 2006 final and then again repeated the feat three years later against Man Utd. When Eto'o left for Inter, switched for Zlatan Ibrahimovic, many saw it as a epitaph of a player past his prime, hamstrung with injuries and ego problems. But Mourinho brought him for his ability to deliver big. In that battle he has had the last laugh over Ibrahimovic and Pep Guardiola. The Swede has been overshadowed by the contributions of Pedro and Bojan, who previously came off the bench.

Eto'o's Serie goalscoring output has been ordinary, 12 in 32 appearances well off his Barca pace but there have been some very important goals against Roma, Fiorentina, and Juventus that kept Inter in the Serie challenge against their rivals. And so far he has lived up his European reputation bringing Chelsea down in the second leg to progress Inter into the Champions League quarterfinals.

He will be in the illustrious company of Alfredo Di Stefano if he scores in today's CL finals and the first one in its modern version, to score in three separate finals.

Eto'o's biggest strength is that he lies under the radar, the man left unmarked, lurking in the corners, or suddenly breaking free. Bayern will focus on Milito, Maicon, or Sneijder but they would be naive to overlook this man's record.

Rinus Michels the legendary coach who refined Totaalvoetbal or Total Football

Ruud Krol, the left back in the 1974 Dutch team summarized it best:

"Our system was also a solution to a physical problem. How can you play for 90 minutes and remain strong? If I as a left back run 70 meters up the wing it's not good if I immediately have to run back 70 to my starting place. So if the left midfielder takes my place and left winger takes the midfield position, then it shortens the distance. That was the philosophy."

If there is one country that knows the importance of space, it is the Dutch. With land at a premium, they came up with innovative ways to increase acreage to accommodate one of the highest population densities in Europe. They are masters of land reclamation.

Pushing those boundaries of space was a huge feature of those legendary Ajax teams in the 1960s which took European football by storm. There was nothing like it seen before. Rinus Michels who came to Ajax in 1964 after Vic Buckingham was sacked initiated a radical breakaway from the traditional norms associated with football.

As a player you could be anything, a striker, a midfielder, or a defender. The exigencies of that moment dictated your nomenclature. Krol points out above, you were supposed to fill in the space left behind by the wingback, whether it was the left midfielder or the striker.

David Goldblatt in his masterful opus " The Ball Is Round" writes, "alongside this display of positional flexibility and position switching, Ajax attempted to change the space in which the game was being played. "

Wingers and attacking full backs stretched the field to the utmost, hugging the touchlines. While in defense they collapsed the playing area. Crowding the ball carrier and the opposition, playing a high defensive line including the goalkeeper, and using the offside trap.

"When they attacked they attacked with eleven, when they defended they defended with eleven."

The hierarchical sense of football was turned on its head. In its place was what they would call in cybernetic parlance, a parallel distributed process. It allowed for speedier responses to changes in spatial demands, i.e., the expansion and collapse of space. The continuum of the game was dictated by which player would have the best access to that space, either by a pass, or an intercept. It made no difference in the division of labour whether he was a striker, a full back, or a midfielder. There was a constant switching of positions.

Barry Hulshoff, the Ajax defender on this new approach, " It was about making space, coming into space, and organizing space-like architecture on the football pitch. "

Playing the sort of high intensity, high energy football demanded extra-ordinary levels of fitness and discipline. Michels completely changed the club culture. Under him, players trained full time, upto four training sessions a day. Carlos Tevez would have never hacked it under this system. Players eschewed ego for complete professionalism and a commitment to win.

Elements of total football were already in place before Michels showed up at Ajax, by his predecessors, Jack Reynolds and Buckingham. However, their ideas although radical, could not be implemented with success because of a number of reasons, but one major factor was the lack of like minded players.

Michels made a number of changes getting rid of the players who he believed could not be part of this new philosophy. He brought in Velibor Vasovic, a tough minded defender from Partizan Belgrade with an unremitting desire to win. From the Ajax youth ranks rose names that would go down in history including Krol, Neeskens, Suurbier, Hulshoff, Muhrens, and Johann Cruyff , the future poster boy of Totalvoetbal. Cruyff and then Stefan Kovacs, the coach installed in place when Michels left for Barca, guided Ajax to its finest hour.

Two antithetical philosophies clashed in the 1972 European Cup final. The suffocating nihilism of Catenaccio embodied by Helenio Herrera and Inter and the free flowing Totaalvoetbal of Michels and Ajax. It was Ajax winning the final, 2-0, heralding the death of Catenaccio.

The legacy of Totaalvoetbal is not just preserved in the Dutch teams that so many love but it has been propagated outside its shores. In fact, that might be the singular achievement of this philosophy. Michels left in 1971 for Barcelona orchestrating a rash of Dutch coaches who have burnished that club with indelible elements of Totaalvoetbal. Cruyff was to follow and then Van Gaal. The number fours in Barca's cantera provide a unique counterpoint to Barca's high possession, high pressure game.

Van Gaal acknowledges his debt to Michels. But he sees himself as different too.

"My idol, my father was Rinus Michels, who was runner-up with Holland in 1974 and the 1988 European champions. It is the same way in Munich. Only Michels was too defensive, I'm more attacking. It has made us popular and successful."

Jose Mourinho can claim some revenge on Totaalvoetball, 38 years later with his version of Catenaccio proving to be successful in overcoming Barcelona in the Champions League semi-finals. Can he do it again today?

Another look at Mourinho's epic celebration.Ferguson hails Mourinho's perfect plan that led to this

Look at Mourinho take off. As 52 sprinklers in the Camp Nou are turned on their celebration.

Jose Mourinho shows why he is so polarizing. Not for him, the quiet dignified air of triumph but the ugly celebration of jingoism and vanity. Maybe it was aimed at the Italian football establishment who he despises.

Victor Valdes tried to cut short his preening celebrations but he went on undaunted. Kind of sad because Mourinho spent some of his formative years at Barca as an understudy to Sir Bobby Robson when both moved from Porto in 1996.

Thirty eight years after Giacinto Facchetti scored the goal to stun Liverpool and march to their second European Cup final on a 4-3 aggregate, it was Jose Mourinho and his men keeping their date with destiny.

In a contemporary twist, the Nerazzurri did that day what Barcelona failed to accomplish today, overcome a 3-1 deficit. There was no away goal advantage, Inter actually had to score three goals to advance. An almost impossible feat was achieved. In the final, they overcame Benfica through the incomparable Jair.

Mourrinho's passage to the Bernabeu was equally thorny. Through the Camp Nou fortress. A task of monumental proportions against a team brimming with firepower and imbued with a fiery ambition of its own, to see them crowned champions in the abode of their arch rivals. It did not start auspiciously for Mourinho as Goran Pandev retired with an injury minutes before kick off. Cristian Chivu was pressed into service.

What unfolded was one of the most extraordinary display of defensive mettle in modern times. It is hard to separate who did what and how many times they did what they had to do but they did what they had to do to get to where they had to go.To the Bernabeu.

Lucio, Walter Samuel, Cristian Chivu, Sneijder, Cambiasso, all threw their bodies behind the ball and turned the area in front of Julio Cesar into a sea of white shirts as Barca desperately tried scaling the ramparts.

To be fair, Motta's ejection in the 26' minute simplified Mourinho's tactics. Till then he had maintained a modicum of counterattack. With Motta gone and Inter down to ten men, it was clear that they had to defend the rest of the game. Inter's full court press began deep in Barca territory as Milito and Sneijder's tireless striving slowed the champions down. Their normally self assured passing game was challenged repeatedly by the scuffling Inter players as Barca increasingly resorted to long distance efforts.

With 75% possession and 45 minutes of ball control it would appear it was a matter of time before Barca would breach Inter. Stunningly enough they only managed four shots at goal. But one of them produced the save of the century. Messi's wickedly curling shot was goalward bound when Julio Cesar lunged full tilt, body horizontal, every sinew stretched and with finger tips changed its course.

A few minutes before, Sergio Busquets adding to his bag of mendacity, went down like a pole axed steer after Thiago Motta in a bone headed display pushed the midfielder on the face. I had predicted that these two would engage in extra-curricular activities and they did not disappoint. Frank De Bleekere punished Motta by producing a red card. A bit harsh. But Motta should have known better.

Pique showed a superb touch in the 84th minute to give Barca hope as the Camp Nou faithful returned to a full throated exhortation of their team to look for that decisive second goal. Pique took control of Xavi's outlet pass after holding the line, faked full back Ivan Cordoba and Julio Cesar by stopping on a dime, swiveled around, and swept the ball into an empty net. It was a goal that Messi would have been proud of. A moment that restored faith in their style and destiny. And it looked like a Chelsea deja vu was on the cards.

Dani Alves had a case for a spot kick when he was held back by Muntari but De Bleekere turned it down. Inter's hearts were in their mouths moments later when Bojan took Yaya Toure's pass and shot the ball past Cesar in what appeared to be that triumphant goal. Luckily, De Bleekere had spotted Toure's handball before the pass and the goal was called back.

Giacinto Facchetti would have applauded this feat. These Nerazzurri are ready to become legends.

Just about a week or so ago Barcelona were in a space of their own.Two words have brought them back to earth.The first word is Jose and the second is Mourinho.Now they need an ad to psyche themselves up. Game on.

UEFA slapped a three match ban on Franck Ribery for his foul on Lyon's Lisandro Lopez which means the French winger will miss out on the CL finals.

A very tough loss because Bayern have a task at hand whether they meet Inter or Barca. Hamit Altintop has been good in his appearances but Ribery can bring the spectacular.

The last known photo of Sergio Busquets "vertical"

Xavi, Messi, Pedro, Ibrahimovic will get all the attention but Busquets could be in the thick of things. So could Inter's Thiago Motta. For all the different reasons.

Jose Mourinho, on the eve of the Inter vs Barca once again demonstrates the ruthless qualities that makes him so reviled and yet so admired. The man evokes such a complex range of emotions.

Calling Barca's desire to get to the Bernabeu to contest the CL final an "obsession" is a stroke of Machiavellian genius. Inter on the other hand have a dream. It bathes them in the same high minded aspirations of Martin Luther King and Nelson Mandela; a better future for their people after years of struggle under the yoke of discrimination and colonization.

The Bernabeu is a focal point because Mourinho believes nothing will stop Barca from trying to take the title in the abode of their bitterest rivals. Their single minded obsession trivializes the most important trademark of that team; the beautiful game. Can such a nakedly base pursuit live in the same body of a beautiful thing?

Of course, Florentino Perez's astronomical €400 million price tag of his players, reductio ad absurdum, disproves Mourinho's contention. Au contraire, it is the Merengues consumed by an unhealthy obsession with their Catalan counterparts. But who wants to parse that? Naturally, it leads to the issue of gamesmanship.

The uglier aspects of the game will be brought to the fore as Sergio Busquets will dive to gain a penalty, free kick, or better still get someone sent off as Barca have 90 minutes to fulfill that obsession. Mourinho has already given us the casus belli. Barca might win but they will be damaged goods. Perfect.

Brothers in Arms?

Inter's in form striker, Diego Milito might end up meeting his brother, Barca's Gabriel Milito, who could start in place of the suspended Carlos Puyol. Another twist in the Barca vs Inter second leg.

" OLIC, WIE IST DAS SCHÖN! OLIC, WIE IST DAS SCHÖN! SOLCHE TORE HAT MAN LANGE NICHT GESEHEN. SO SCHÖN, SO SCHÖN! "

Germany celebrates Ivica Olic. Yes, those were beautiful!

Goal-ah-Olic!

Ivica Olic, the Croatian striker scored a perfect hattrick with his right foot, left foot, and a header as Bayern swamped hapless Lyon.

The Bavarian giants have proved time and time again in their CL campaign that they are second to none when it comes to scoring big goals.

Hans Joerg Butt was only tested once in the 60' minute after Sidney Govou cracked one hard at the German goalie who just managed to palm the ball away. A couple of close calls from Michel Bastos and Bafetimbi Gomis, summed up the extent of Lyon's chances.

Lisandro Lopez was invisible once more, starved of the ball. Cesar Delgado, his fellow Argentinian was even more ineffective in making inroads. Perhaps with Jeremy Toulalan and Kim Kallstrom they Lyon midfield could have organized more effectively as the attack transmuted into a series of solo efforts from Bastos and Govou.

In contrast, the Germans recycled the ball constantly as they pushed and probed and switched their points of attack through Robben, Schweinsteiger, Lahm, and Mueller to soften the Lyon defense.

The French team were reduced to ten men in the 58' minute when Cris was ejected after receiving a second yellow for sarcastically applauding Massimo Busacca. He was reacting to his yellow card for a foul committed on Olic, a decision that the Swiss referee clearly got wrong. But truth be told, an insipid and toothelss Lyon team seemed to have given up long before that. Disappointing when you think of their unbeaten home record and a chance of making history.

The Lyon fans were magnificent to the end refusing to leave the Stade Gerland, chanting and cheering on their team, even as the writing was on the wall.

This is Bayern's eighth entry into the finals of European football's most prestigious event. They won it last in 2001 beating Valencia through penalty shootout. In all, the Bavarian giants have won four titles. They now await either Barca or Inter, which should be settled tomorrow.

A hat-trick from Ivica Olic secured a 4-0 aggregate win - the biggest winning margin in a Champions League semi-final since Juventus beat van Gaal's Ajax 6-2 in the 1996-97 competition.Sir Alex's typical germans have gone through to the final in great style.

All that song and dance about Sneijder not playing turns out to be just that. He resumed normal training today without any sign of his rectus femoris (RF) strain. However, my earlier post about its rehabilitation stands.

Tomorrow, Inter's artist in residence will take the field against Barca. So don't expect a defensive siege. With Sneijder, Barca will have to protect their goal.

The French Federation scheduled no matches for Lyon and the CL semi-finalists spent their weekend relaxing and discussing tactics in the bracing air of Monthieux. It involved some fishing too.

Naturally, it has led to some grumbling from Bayern. But Lyon traveled over 800 km by road to get to Munich for the first leg, so it evens out.

The Borussia M'gladbach match which resulted in Bayern dropping points in a painful draw also saw Martin Demichelis limp off at half time with a calf strain. Daniel Van Buyten followed suit with a similar injury in the 63rd minute. Both central defenders are uncertain to start the match against Lyon in the return leg tomorrow.

With Demichelis and Van Buyten not in the line up, Lyon's predator in chief Lisandro Lopez, hitherto shackled in the first leg should be free to take the direct route.

To make matters worse, Anatoli Tymoschuk will not be on the flight because of stomach flu.

Franck Ribery and Danijel Pranjic are already out with suspensions. However, Mark Van Bommel will be back.

With Schalke beating Hertha, 1-0, the Bavarian giants are being pushed hard. They have the Bundesliga, the German Cup, and the CL title to play for as their squad is beset with injuries, suspensions, and a sex scandal distracting their chief playmaker. Quite a juggling act for Louis Van Gaal in the waning moments of the season.