Lyon 2 – Real Madrid 0; UEFA Champions League matchday 1

I watched about 45 mins of the middle part of this game, and was fortunate to catch both goals. It was definitely an exciting game to watch, and this seems to reflect the nature of the majority of the Champions League matchday 1 games. I have to say, I am very pleasantly surprised by this, as I had mentioned earlier, there is such an immense anti-climax after the World Cup. And so, it is refreshing to see that club soccer is actually so promising and proving itself to be more exciting than ever, not at all like the summer when the sport showed so many signs of needing some real changes.

Anyway, some quick thoughts on Lyon 2 – Real Madrid 0. For the second consecutive season, Lyon manages to stun Real Madrid in France (Last season they thrashed them 3-0). Lyon definitely dominated the game, with plenty of chances, and really played as best they could. They were compact, efficent, quick on the counter attacks, showed that they had talented individuals, but most of all, they just oozed teamwork. The second goal was quite representative of this, where Govou, who was in a great shooting position, thread through a defense-splitting pass to Tiago, who was in an even better goal scoring position. Juninho had a handful of chances from free-kicks all over the place, and came close on all of them, its a pity he didn’t score any though.

Real Madrid seemed the polar opposite. More than anything, they did not look to be a team. Cannavaro was making uncharacteristically silly mistakes, and Casillas was just horrendous at points. I guess they must have been better in the past weekend, when they destroyed Levante 4-1 with hat trick from Ruud Van Nistelrooy, but then again, as one of my friends quickly pointed out, that was Levante. Lyon are certainly in a whole different league, looking to be one of the best teams in Europe currently.

Speaking of best team in Europe currently, FC Barcelona certainly seems to be living up to their billing so far. I’ll save that for a future post though.
To wrap up, I must stress that I did only watch the middle part of the game, so my observations really apply to only the chunk of the game from about the 20th min of the 1st half to the 65th min of the 2nd half, but I doubt things were radically different at other points in the game. Overall I think its fair to say Lyon are continuing to build on their successes of the past 5 season, while Real Madrid and Capello have some serious re-thinking and re-organizing to do.

Finally, here are video highlights of ALL the goals from Matchday 1, courtesy of Youtube (seriously, what an awesome website, but again, I’ll save that for a future post):

Tuesday, September 12th:

Wednesday, September 13th:

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