Wilson: The best Europe has to offer

Posted Tuesday, April 23, 2013 by Foxsports.com

FOX Sports columnist Jonathan Wilson believes the four best teams in Europe are represented in this season's UEFA Champions League semi-finals.

It might not be a line the Premier League wants to hear, but this year, for once, the Champions League semi-finals will feature probably the four best sides in Europe, the champions of this year and last in Spain (almost certainly; Barcelona have yet to formalise their success) and Germany.

Bayern Munich vie with Barcelona as the most attractive side in Europe at the moment, while Borussia Dortmund, underwhelming as they were domestically this season, have excelled in continental competition, and Real Madrid, after all the problems of the winter, have rediscovered their form and have beaten Barca in the league while eliminating them from the Copa del Rey.

The two semi-finals are replete with sub-plots and both have the potential to be classics. Barcelona against Bayern Munich sees the team that Pep Guardiola built face the team he will take over in the summer, a clash of the two sides who have dominated the passing and possession stats for the past two seasons.

For Barcelona, this is a sixth straight semi-final, they are the dominant force in world football at the moment, and yet the sense is of a fading great. Perhaps the way they surged ahead in la Liga in the early part of the season counted against them, generating a sense of complacency, and there were worrying signs against PSG in the quarter-final that they have become dependent on Lionel Messi.

Given the talent in the rest of the squad, and the way many of them have won European Championships and a World Cup with Spain (and this without Messi), that feels an absurd thing to say, but it may be that no matter how good you are, when you have a player of his extraordinary quality, you get used to playing through him and so struggle to adapt when he is injured. That said, if Tito Vilanova is sufficiently recovered after his cancer treatment to take his place regularly in the technical area, some of the positional and tactical issues that have undermined Barca in recent weeks may fade away.

Bayern play a similar style of football but they do so in a rather more robust way. Set-pieces, certainly, are an a area in which they would seem to have a clear advantage and if their passing games cancel each other out, that could be decisive - as, in fact, it ended up being when Spain beat Germany in the 2010 World Cup semi-final (although Spain had dominated possession in that game without scoring). Barca's record of five clean sheets in their last 21 matches - particularly given how they tend to control the ball - doesn't inspire any great confidence that they can keep out a side averaging almost three goals a game in the Bundesliga this season.

There is a difference in shape: Barca a 4-3-3 with - usually - Messi as a false nine, although he did play behind David Villa in the 4-0 home with over AC Milan, while Bayern operate a 4-2-3-1. In theory that gives them more of a focal point, although Mario Mandzukic's movement is far too fevered for him ever to be considered a target man. The real interest is in the central midfield shape: Sergio Busquets, sitting deep for Barca, will face Thomas Muller, while Xavi and Andres Iniesta come up against Bastian Schweinsteiger and either Javi Martinez or Luiz Gustavo. That seems immediately to shift the game into Bayern's half, but they are unlikely to be too discomforted by that and may reflect that the shape-for-shape mapping means they have a ready-made defensive structure. The danger then, though, is Messi dropping deep effectively gives Barca an extra man in central midfield and leaves the two Bayern centre-backs marking nobody.

Dortmund and Real Madrid have already met this season, in the group stages, in which Dortmund own 2-1 at home before a 2-2 draw in the Bernabeu. That gives them a slight psychological advantage in that they know Madrid are beatable, but the downside is that those games gave Jose Mourinho the opportunity to study them. As his mastery of Barcelona over the past two seasons suggests, Mourinho is a master at working out how to dismantle teams who have beaten him. Both sides play a 4-2-3-1 but they key here seems the flanks: if Dortmund can control the ball sufficiently that Lukasz Piszczek can get forward from right-back, he is unlikely to be tracked by Cristiano Ronaldo and that renders Madrid vulnerable - and of course leaves Dortmund vulnerable to Roanldo's pace if Madrid counter-attack.

And there is also the Mourinho narrative to consider. He has made clear he is leaving the club in the summer and there would be a certain irony if he did so after helping them to la decimal, the tenth title they have yearned for since victory over Bayer Leverkusen in Glasgow in 2002. When he won the Champions League with Porto and Internazionale - and only Bob Paisley has ever won the trophy three times - he left immediately afterwards. It suits his style, and perhaps even more suits his image: he parachutes in, wins what needs winning, and disappears again, like the morally ambiguous loner hero of a spaghetti Western.

He's not the only coach with a great back story: Jupp Heynckes, soon to be deposed at Bayern but enjoying the greatest season of his career and perhaps the club's history, looking for a point-making treble; Jurgen Klopp, the young maverick on the rise; and Vilanova, battling illness to prove himself and emerge from the shadow of his predecessor (who will, of course, by Heynckes's successor).

In terms of potential, it's hard to imagine a better semi-final line-up. Now let's just hope it lives up to that.