A football forum specialising in European league and cup football as well as international & off topic discussion!
Protheus wrote:Haven´t been here much lately heh.
Anyway, we are not playing very well this season so i do not have high hopes of a great result. Still, i do expect us to win today as Wenger will probably uderstimate us again as he always does, saving a couple of stars for the premier league games.
It is obviously a difficult game but i am usually optimist about our performance at home.
But i doubt it will be a 0-0. Both us and Arsenal do not play very well the defensive game so anything in that regard would be risky for both teams. I am curious to Arsenal aproach for this game, if they go all attack we will counter a lot but if they wait for us to do the attack then the game will be more tactical.
To be honest IMO Arsenal is the worst english team to play against for us owing to their style of play.
Oh by the way, we don´t score against Arsenal? We've only played twice at home and the team that haven´t scored at Dragão so far was Arsenal
06/07 CL 0-0
08/09 CL 2-0 (Bruno Alves, Lisandro Lopez)
Perhaps the greatest challenge for a manager isn’t building success, it’s rebuilding. You win silverware with a group of players and then — because they’ve aged or because your owner decides to cash in — you have to start over. Except because you’ve been successful and fans and media have grown accustomed to it, the pressure to win right away is immense, despite the new cast of characters.
Jesualdo Ferreira, the Porto coach, knows a thing or two about this.
In June 2008, he won his second consecutive league title with Porto, the club’s third in a row. That summer he lost Paulo Assunção, his midfield general, José Bosingwa, his pacey right back, and Ricardo Quaresma, his star winger. Undeterred, Ferreira again won the Portuguese championship, becoming the first coach to win three titles on the bounce. And, again, his squad was gutted.
Porto earned more than £100 million from those deals; less than a third was reinvested in the side. Imagine Arsène Wenger losing Bacary Sagna, Gaël Clichy, Cesc Fàbregas, Alexandre Song, Samir Nasri and Robin van Persie over two seasons and you begin to understand the transition facing Ferreira, who, effectively, has become a victim of his own success.
And “victim” seems to be the right word. Porto have finished first or second every year bar one since 1982. Yet now they are third, nine points behind Benfica and five behind Braga.
Yet amid the talent drain at the Estádio do Dragão, one player who has held up his side of the bargain is Radamel Falcão García Zárate.
The Colombia striker has scored 20 goals in 27 appearances in all competitions this season. He was signed from River Plate last summer for £3.5 million, which, given that he is 24, must make him one of the bargains of the season. And he also has a compelling personal story, to boot.
His father, Radamel García, was an unremarkable defender in Colombia’s top flight who never fulfilled his footballing dreams and was determined that his son have the best possible crack at glory. He named him Falcão, in honour of the legendary Brazilian.
At 11 he got Falcão a trial at Ajax, a club that — in the pre-Fifa regulation era — made it a habit of attracting the best teenage talent from abroad. A wide-eyed Falcão impressed the Dutch club, but just as he was at the point of following in the footsteps of Jari Litmanen, Patrick Kluivert and Kanu, his mother pulled the plug.
Instead, his father first sent him to Bogotá, to join the legendary Millonarios and then, at 15, to Buenos Aires and River Plate.
His time in River’s youth ranks was marked by a combination of promise, injuries and disillusionment. He established himself as a regular at 19, going on a tear in which he scored seven goals in eight games. But then he suffered a knee injury that kept him away from the game for ten months.
Figuring he might need a Plan B, Falcão enrolled in a journalism degree course. And he also found God, joining an evangelical group, Locos Por Cristo, or “Crazy For Christ”.
He returned in September 2006, forming an efficient partnership with Gonzalo Higuaín, who is now at Real Madrid. Three more seasons at River and he was ready for the jump to European football. Maybe not as quickly as Dad would have liked, but with a Bachelor of Arts diploma on his wall and renewed faith in his soul.
If his path to the big time was unconventional, he has a kindred spirit in Ferreira, who spent most of his career as backroom assistant before getting his first big opportunity at the age of 55, with Benfica. Even then he was greeted with scepticism, with none other than José Mourinho declaring: “This could be the story of a donkey who worked for 30 years but never became a horse.”
Ferreira may not be a thoroughbred but he has steered Porto well over the past 3½ seasons. He knows that many of his best men — starting with Falcão — are likely to abandon ship after this season, but, by now he’s used to it.
Gabriele Marcotti
Protheus wrote:Haven´t been here much lately heh.
Anyway, we are not playing very well this season so i do not have high hopes of a great result. Still, i do expect us to win today as Wenger will probably uderstimate us again as he always does, saving a couple of stars for the premier league games.
It is obviously a difficult game but i am usually optimist about our performance at home.
But i doubt it will be a 0-0. Both us and Arsenal do not play very well the defensive game so anything in that regard would be risky for both teams. I am curious to Arsenal aproach for this game, if they go all attack we will counter a lot but if they wait for us to do the attack then the game will be more tactical.
To be honest IMO Arsenal is the worst english team to play against for us owing to their style of play.
Oh by the way, we don´t score against Arsenal? We've only played twice at home and the team that haven´t scored at Dragão so far was Arsenal
06/07 CL 0-0
08/09 CL 2-0 (Bruno Alves, Lisandro Lopez)
; 3-Bacary Sagna, 31-Sol Campbell, 5-Thomas Vermaelen, 22-Gael Clichy; 2-Abou Diaby, 15-Denilson, 4-Cesc Fabregas; 7-Tomas Rosicky, 52-Nicklas Bendtner, 8-Samir Nasri.
L r dd wrote:I can see why Quaresma only works in the Portuguese league.
L r dd wrote:I can see why Quaresma only works in the Portuguese league.
How shite has Clichy become? didn't he used to be decent.
Home