Barcelona - Chelsea

2/24/2006: UEFA Champions League, Barcelona 2, Chelsea 1

For Barcelona it was sweet revenge as they bested Chelsea in their Round of 16, the team that eliminated them last year from the same competition. Barcelona positioned themselves into a favorable position by beating the Millionaires on their home ground with a convincing 2-1 victory. A 1-1 tie in the second leg at the Nou Camp assured Barcelona’s passage into the quarterfinals.

The method of that first leg victory at Stamford Bridge was the most impressive aspect of this match. Chelsea sits atop England’s Premiership by some 20 points, yet in this game looked like a relegation zone club against Spain’s best team. Barcelona at one point had a possession in the 67% mark, an astounding number considering the opposition. It didn’t help Chelsea’s cause that del Horno was expelled for what appeared to be a dubious foul on Leonel Messi. Regrettably for Chelsea, the sending off exacerbated the inequity in possession time and Barcelona quickly pounced on the one man advantage to firmly establish even more control in the midfield

After del Horno’s expulsion, Mourinho may have panicked a bit when he pulled the attacking Joe Cole in favor for the more defensive oriented Claude Makelely. Whether he had to reshape his entire team after the expulsion is debatable, but what is certain is that Barcelona eventually found a way to exploit its one man advantage.

After watching this game, I am more convinced than ever that Ronaldinho is the planet’s best footballer. He absolutely dominated this matchup with his stewardship of the midfield. Ronaldinho is a player who can do it all: pass, shoot, dribble, run off the ball. But perhaps his best qualities are his explosiveness and ability to create space. This was clearly evident in the first goal of the second leg when he ran at what appeared to be the entire Chelsea back four, shrugged off all comers, and coolly slotted the ball into the goal.

If Ronaldinho’s goal in the second leg was the result of solitary labour, Barcelona's second goal of the first leg was a thing of sheer collaborative beauty. Chelsea had a corner kick which was headed out to the right wing, where a streaking van Brockhorst dribbled the ball a good 60 meters before passing to who else, Ronaldinho, who cleverly crossed the ball to hisleft to Samuel Etto, The African made no mistake as he put the ball in what ESPN commentator Tommy Smith’s proverbial “old onion bag”. I counted 20 seconds between the Chelsea corner kick and the ball finding the back of the Chelsea net. A scintillating display of full field football and one of the most stunning goals I have ever seen. (A close second to Mexico’s similarly structured goal against Holland in the 1998 World Cup which put the Aztecas up 2-0.)

Although Ronaldinho is the engine of this team, he has a complement of world-class footballers to help him out. Barcelona, like most of the grand teams of Europe, are stocked with a veritable array of international players from the best soccer playing nations of the world. The list of players is dizzying: Leonel Messi, Giovanni Van Brockhorst, Samuel Etto, Rafael Marquez, Henrik Larson, etc. etc.. Oh yeah, and Barcelona does have a pretty good Spanish player in Puyol, their iron-man defensive genius.

Not that Chelsea doesn’t have its own stock of world-class players. After all they’re not dubbed the Millionaires for nothing. But on that night in Stamford Bridge, Barcelona were by far the superior club.