Champions League Betting: Barca on the brink?

/ Ben Lyttleton / 23 November 2009 / Leave a Comment

"Barcelona are not as dominant as last year but they will need to be at their best on Tuesday night against Inter Milan. Barcelona are [1.83] to beat the Italian champions, and [1.85] to finish top of Group F."

After last season's phenomenal successes, Barcelona are struggling domestically and in the Champions League. With crucial matches against Inter and Real looming, it could get worse for Pep Guardiola's men this week, says Ben Lyttleton.

This is a huge week for some of Europe's biggest clubs: Liverpool, whose Champions League fate is out of their hands as they look to improve on their record of one win in 10 games, and Bayern Munich, who splashed over €50m on summer recruits Mario Gomez and Arjen Robben, but need to beat Maccabi Haifa to have a chance of overhauling Juventus to stay in the competition.

And then of course there are the Champions League holders, Barcelona: this weekend they lost their place at the top of La Liga after drawing 1-1 with Athletic Bilbao, their third draw in five games. In fact, if you except their Copa del Rey wins over minnows Cultural Leonosa, Barcelona have only won two of their last seven matches. And this week it could get worse for them: they face the prospect of becoming the first European champions to fail to make it out of the group stages, and they take on new Spanish leaders Real Madrid at the weekend.

So what has happened at Barcelona to leave them on the brink of elimination at this stage of the season? The stats tell part of the story: at this stage of the season, in all competitions, last year Barcelona had scored 54 goals while this year the total is 45. They have had the same number of shots on goal but they are scoring fewer. Away from home last season, they averaged 2.3 goals per game, a figure that is currently 1.4.

One of the problems is in midfield, where the goals have not quite dried up but have certainly slowed down. Last season, their first 20 matches yielded 13 goals from five different midfielders, while this season that figure is eight from two (six of which have been scored by Seydou Keita, fast becoming a crucial part of this team).

And while Thierry Henry and Lionel Messi have been struggling with form and fitness - and both were side-tracked by their nations' efforts to qualify for the World Cup - the bulk of the scoring burden has fallen on the shoulders of Zlatan Ibrahimovic, who has been a brilliant addition to the squad (much to the surprise of the many doubters) but might miss this week's games with a hamstring injury.

It is a tricky balance for coach Pep Guardiola at the moment: when the press are laying into his side, as they did after the surprise home defeat to Rubin Kazan, he backs them and says, "We are better than last year." And when the team does click and it all works, as it did against Atletico Madrid (5-2, Week 3) or Real Zaragoza (6-1, Week 8), he will say, "I'm not happy, we need to improve things."

The truth is somewhere in between. Barcelona are not as dominant as last year but they will need to be at their best on Tuesday night against Inter Milan. Barcelona are ([1.83]) to beat the Italian champions, and ([1.85]) to finish top of Group F. Inter are ([5.2]) and ([2.58]) in the same markets.
The fact that Inter's coach is Jose Mourinho, a former Barcelona employee but hardly on good terms with the club since his run-ins with them as Chelsea boss, adds to the spice of the occasion.

Five days later, Barcelona takes on Real Madrid at Camp Nou in Spanish football's 'El Clasico'. The hosts are ([2.04]) to win that game, and still shortest-priced ([1.79]) to win La Liga, with Real Madrid ([2.6]). This will be a crucial week in Guardiola's reign. Now it's time for the players who served him so well last season to show some of that form again.