Barcelona v VfB Stuttgart - as it happened

Christian Gross is looked on as a bit of a failure in this country, on account of the unsuccessful succession of nanoseconds he was gifted to ply his trade at Tottenham Hotspur. Since leaving the club, Gross has won four Swiss championships at Basel, to add to the two he'd already won with Grasshoppers; four Swiss Cups, to add to the one he'd already bagged at the aforementioned Zurich club; reached the latter stages of the Champions League; beat Liverpool, Celtic, Juventus and Deportivo la Coruna in European competition; and moved to Stuttgart, immediately hauling a relegation-haunted side out of trouble with seven wins in 11 matches. Tottenham, meanwhile: Oh! Anyway, Gross's fast-improving side had the better of the reigning European champions in the first leg of this Round Of 16 rubber. Cacau and Pavel Pogrebnyak caused Barcelona no end of bother during the entire first half and plenty of the second, running rings around Carlos Puyol, Rafael Marquez and Gerard Pique. But Barca aren't Barca for nothing, and when Stuttgart faded awhile in the second period, Zlatan Ibrahimovic scored his first-ever career goal in a big game, I think that's right, to secure a 1-1 draw. Well done, Zlatan! Barca are strong favourites, then. But Stuttgart are on the up, and stranger things have happened. Kick off: 7.45pm. Barcelona: Valdes, Dani Alves, Pique, Puyol, Maxwell, Busquets, Toure Yaya, Iniesta, Messi, Henry, Pedro. Subs: Pinto, Marquez, Ibrahimovic, Bojan, Keita, Milito, Jeffren. VfB Stuttgart: Lehmann, Celozzi, Niedermaier, Delpierre, Molinaro, Trasch, Kuzmanovic, Khedira, Hleb, Cacau, Pogrebniak. Subs: Stolz, Osorio, Boulahrouz, Marica, Gebhart, Rudy, Hilbert. Referee: Alain Hamer (Luxembourg) Barcelona beware! They're going out, according to Greg Mungin: "I've got a sneaky feeling Hleb will make his parent club regret not putting a clause in his loan contract. You'd think they'd have remembered Morientes knocking Madrid out the Big Cup while on loan at Monaco." I don't know about you, but I always listen to people who bandy about phrases like "parent club", they must know what they're talking about. They must do. Meanwhile first-name fan Adam - he's just called Adam - sends in an email with the subject "Zlatan on the bench?" That's Mr Ibrahimovic to you, sir. "Really!? Are they THAT confident?! Are you sure you are not intoxicated?" I'm just high on life, Adam; 46 million euros of big-game bottle parked on the bench. Oh Barca, how could you! And we're off! Barca are kitted out in their usual red-and-blue stripes, Stuttgart in their favoured white and red. Henry enters the box down the inside-left channel after a ball from Messi, and unleashes a shot towards the top-left corner. It's not much of an effort, but Lehmann parries into the air and spills over the line anyway. The corner is, in the Premier League style, wasted. But what a ball from Messi. And what a hapless cock-up from the eccentric Lehmann. 3 min: Barcelona are stroking it around in the leisurely manner. 4 min: Messi is everywhere at the moment. He diddles down the right and reaches the byline, cutting the ball back to Pedro Rodriguez on the edge of the area. The resulting shot is low and dragged wide right. 5 min: Stuttgart have their first effort on the Barcelona goal. From the left, Player I Only Saw Out The Corner Of My Eye And Couldn't Identify, Which Is Just As Well cuts inside and hoofs a hopeless shot into the top-right corner of the stand behind the goal. Still, it's a start. 6 min: A worrying sign for Barcelona, this: a ball bouncing straight down the middle of the park nearly sets Pogrebnyak clear in the area. Luckily for the hosts, Puyol comes across to nick the ball away at the very last second, with the striker about to welt the ball goalward. Camp Nou fell very silent for a second then. MINA nice open start, this. Stuttgart are throwing the ball forward at every opportunity, Celozzi scooting down the right, Hleb dancing down the left, but they're leaving space at the back. Messi cuts in from the right and sends a low shot whistling goalwards. Lehmann does well to get the old bones down to scoop up. 11 min: End to end, a lot of pretty passing, not much happening up front, though. "On the American coverage, Tony Gale just said 'Barca don't liek it up 'em.'," reports Aidan Gibson. "Seeing as he said that about Arsenal, I'm wondering if he has to say that about every passing side in football?" He was on Sky the other week insisting that the West Ham team that came third in 1985/86 was better than both Liverpool and Everton that year, and the Blackburn side that won the league nine years later. Tony Gale is a very confused man. 13 min: STUPENDOUS GOAL!!! Barcelona 1-0 Stuttgart. This is something else. Messi picks up the ball from Toure on the right, cuts inside, and keeps going until he reaches the left-hand of the D, at which point he wheechs an unstoppable shot into the top-left corner. No backlift, nothing. Amazing. And there were four - four - white shirts converging on him. 15 min: Stuttgart are this close to equalising straight away. The ball's flung in from the left to the far post. Pogrebnyak heads back into the six-yard box, where Pique and Puyol are having thundering panic attacks. Delpierre looks to head it home, but the referee blows up for bugger all a foul on Valdes by Cacau. 19 min: Pedro retraces the steps Messi took for the goal, but before he reaches the area attempts to slip the ball into the area for Iniesta, rushing in from the left. Celozzi gets ahead of the Barca midfieder, though, and snuffs out the danger. Iniesta falls over and claims a penalty, but come off it. This is an incredibly attractive, attack-minded game. 21 min: Messi, in the centre of the park, tries to play Maxwell in down the left. The ball's toe-poked away from danger by Celozzi, and anyway Maxwell's offside, but Barcelona are looking dangerous every single time they go forward. 22 min: THIS IS TOO EASY. Barcelona 2-0 Stuttgart. Pass, pass, pass, pass, pass, pass, pass, pass, pass, passity, pass. Then Messi pings a little ball down the inside-left channel and into the area for Toure, who romps ahead of Celozzi. Toure strokes the ball into the middle, where Pedro Rodriguez sidefoots home into an empty net, Lehmann having been drawn off his line by Toure long ago. 25 min: Stuttgart are wandering around like folk with manic depression. After a bright start, their passes aren't pinging around any more. This could be a long evening for them unless they stop dreaming of going under the Special Blanket on the sofa with the lights out. "I'm getting a bit fed up of the Champions League, it seems to be going on forever this year," writes Anto O Connell, after the quickest 22 minutes in this year's tournament so far. Still, his point stands. "They need to go back to all the teams playing on one week instead of this stretched out rubbish." Preach on, brother. Can we get rid of all the non-champions too? People keep telling me to get over this, but that isn't making things any better, to be honest. 28 min: So nearly three. Toure romps down the left, and hooks a low cross into the area. Henry is rushing into the box, but despite sliding at full stretch, can't get a toe on the ball to guide it past his former team-mate Lehmann and into the net. Speaking of Jens, here's Arsenal fan Zach Neeley, with a paean to the Gunners' former keeper. "Strange to say, but even with how good Henry was as a Gunner, I miss Lehmann more. For whatever reason, if one player's failing is not playing big in big games and the other's is being insane (take the final against Barca) the latter seems easier to forgive." 31 min: Iniesta gives the ball away in the centre of his own half. Trasch, Khedira and Pogrebnyak ping it around in triangles for a few seconds, but eventually Iniesta makes up for his error with some top-notch harrying, and the ball's won back. All the Stuttgart players now have scribbly little black clouds hovering over their heads. 34 min: Barca are passing it around a lot, Stuttgart can't get hold of the ball at all. Rain is beginning to fall from the little scribbly clouds. 37 min: Delpierre shoves Busquets in the back, a good old-fashioned pub-fight starter, 30 yards out, just to the right of goal. That's a free kick and no mistake. Alves, the Roberto Carlos de nos jours, in that he seems to take 100 free kicks every game and never score from one, drags a hellish effort wide left. That was awful . "When pundits such as yourself call Lens Lehmann eccentric," writes Russell Brady, mistaking me for the sort of person whose opinions people actually listen to, "is that some sort of code for the fact that he's bollix?" Ladies and gentlemen, on the fourth birthday of Comment is Free, a textbook illustration of how the internet age has improved reporting immeasurably. 39 min: Molinaro powers past Alves down the left, breaking into the box. It's a promising-looking move from Stuttgart, the first one for a long while, but scandalously the referee pulls up play for a tug on Alves's shirt. That's a really poor decision, especially as the disillusioned visitors need all the help they can get at the moment. 41 min: All match, Messi has been camped in the centre of the Stuttgart half, pinging balls left, right and centre. This time he strokes one straight down the middle for Henry, who does what he does best: falls over and starts to grizzle. 43 min: Lehmann is booked for taking too long over a free kick. It wasn't really worth it, was it, Jens? 44 min: Kuzmanovic swings the worst free kick in the history of world football into the area from the left. It's easily dealt with by Barcelona's first man, and soon enough, Stuttgart having loaded the Barca box, the home side are flooding upfield. Luckily for the Germans, Messi misplaces a pass for once, and the danger is gone. That was a fine chance for Stuttgart to pressurise the occasionally creaky Barca defence, and in the end they looked more likely to concede. Poor stuff. HALF TIME: Barcelona 2-0 Stuttgart. There's enough time for Pogrebnyak to go in the book for smashing Busquets in the throat, then that's that for the half. "Call me an optimist but if Barcelona stop scoring and Stuttgart score the next one soon, this might not be all over," chirps Ian Copestake, who may or may not actually be off to bed. Serious half-time analysis: "Everyone sings the praises of Barcelona for their style, etc," says David Wall enigmatically, and so on, "and it's true that they're very attractive to watch, and effective. But to play devil's advocate, even they can become a bit repetitive because of the lack of variation in their style of play. I love Hendrix's extended solos but they're better when balanced against some straight-ahead riffing elsewhere on the record. Wouldn't Barca be even better if they mixed it up just a little? I thought that was the whole point of buying Ibrahimovic, so is it an admission of failure that he's left on the bench?" Haircut joke, the sort of observation you used to get in the very early fanzines, but if it's OK for 2 Good 2 Bad on Match of the Day 2 to exhume this sort of thing every week, it's good enough for us. "I know we've had this loads of times, but which member of Def Leppard gave his 80s hair to Carlos Puyol?" wonders Mike Wilner, just one swannee-whistle sound short of delivering a proper belly laugh. There's a zinger about Lehmann and the drummer in there somewhere, isn't there, but I'll not be rummaging around for it. And we're off again! "Stuttgart's only hope is if Barca embrace St Patrick's Day, Irish-style, and during the break go on an absolute bender for 15 full minutes and come out for the second half bleary-eyed and traffic-coned up," writes Paul Neilan. Sadly for the German side, Messi is not pushing a trolley containing an unconscious Henry, vomit all down his front. They'll be hoping their change - Celozzi has been repaced with Gebhart - has some effect, though. 48 min: A pass is looped into the Stuttgart box, Messi so nearly getting a toe to the ball as he slides in near the right-hand post, where the ball's dropping. But not quite. "There's a terrible zinger about the Def Leppard drummer and Thierry Henry that Irish football supporters tell themselves as they're drowning in their own tears," writes Donald Mahoney, aka The Weaver. 51 min: Christian Gross is standing on the touchline, wearing a well-cut trenchcoat, his brow furrowed, a dignified figure. His team can't get a touch again. "Is it just me, or has Peter Drury over done the word beautiful?" The "me" here is Niall Finnegan. "Barcelona play really nice football, everyone knows, but I have seen my team Altrincham keep possession for 2 or 3 minutes in the Blue Square Premier. Two great goals, but he needs to stop reminding us how aesthetically pleasing they are." 52 min: The crowd give Ibrahimovic a round of applause as he jogs up and down the side of the pitch. A 46-million-euro hand warmer. 54 min: For clipping Messi's ankles from behind, Kuzmanovic is issued with a yellow ticket. 55 min: Wow. The ball breaks to Messi in the middle of the Stuttgart half. Most players would get the ball under control with a touch or two, but Messi doesn't faff about, driving immediately down the inside-left channel towards the area, checking on its edge, and pulling the ball across for Toure, who sends a low shot this far wide left. So nearly a picturebook goal. 57 min: Again Messi runs into the Stuttgart box down the left. He attempts to clip the ball into the centre for Henry, but the ball's bundled away by Delpierre. He is immense tonight. "The Wikipedia article on Hleb says that he once expressed regret about leaving Arsenal, but there is no citation for that statement," reports Gordon Burns, both the Woodward and the Bernstein of our times. "One has to assume that, when Hleb left for Spain, it was not his plan to sit on Barca's bench, then get defenestrated to a mid-table German club and reunited with crazy Jens. I sort of feel sorry for him. Here's an idea: there may be a spot in the midfield for him at LA Galaxy." 60 min: MESSI... DEAR ME. Barcelona 3-0 Stuttgart. Barcelona string three or four one-touch passes into the centre from the right wing, the ball eventually being shuttled across to Messi by Alves. Messi's on the edge of the D with his back to goal, so he spins left, then wallops a low shot into the bottom right in one smooth movement. Like many folk, I spent some time wondering the other day whether Wayne Rooney was perhaps the best player in the world at the moment... no, no, no. 63 min: Hleb slides a delicious ball down the inside-left channel for Molinaro, who tears into the area. It looks dangerous, but Victor Valdes is out quickly to close the angle - and the full back's offside anyway. Molinaro's head falls turfwards. Poor Stuttgart are spent. 66 min: To wild cheers, Ibrahimovic comes on for Busquets. 68 min: Again Hleb and Molinaro combine down the left, the full back romping into the area in space. The resulting cross is wayward, way too high. Stuttgart appear to be giving it one last haul. 69 min: Alves, running down the right at 389mph, sends a deep cross to the far post, where Messi is on hand to cushion a header towards the bottom-right corner. It's a lovely touch, but Lehmann is positioned well to kick clear. That really would have been that, as though this isn't over already, over for a long, long time. 70 min: Marica is on for Pogrebnyak, relief for anyone typing at speed with budget frozen sausages for fingers. 72 min: Alves, the right wing, Messi, the centre, you know how it works. This time the ball's to the near post, chested down, and a shot's deflected off Niedermeier. Corner. From which Toure heads clumsily wide left from eight yards out, Henry unable to get any part of his body on the ball as it flashes ahead of him. Not his head, nor his left hand, nor his right hand. 75 min: A high ball from the right into the Barca box causes a wee bit of trouble, Marica attempting to take the cross down and poke home. He can't control, though, the ball bouncing apologetically well wide right. 77 min: Ibrahimovic charges down the inside-left channel after a long pass slipped down the wing from Maxwell, but he's miles offside. "Did anybody else see this?" begins Jan Krcmar. "Henry was complaining about the quality of the pass before it was even played!" I didn't, but I'm prepared to believe it. In other Petulance News, Ibrahimovic puts the ball in the net despite the offside decision, and Lehmann - already on a booking for timewasting - refuses to go and get it. Eventually he gives in. That was supremely pointless. 78 min: Henry is replaced by Milito. 80 min: Ibrahimovic twists and turns on the edge of the area. The ball breaks through two challenges, the player doesn't, but Iniesta is steaming in from the left, on hand to attempt a sidefoot into the bottom-right corner. It's a lovely effort, but one the spreadeagled Lehmann is all over. And the flag goes up for offside anyway. Nevertheless, that was a superlative save. 82 min: Pedro Rodriguez is racing down the right in yards of space. He's got Messi and Ibrahimovic in the centre. Surely this is going to be a fourth. But he allows the ball to clank off his shin, giving Niedermeier time to bound across and get a block tackle in. That was godawful ball control, a hell of a chance thrown away, a small blot on a very impressive performance by the European champions. 85 min: Toure slips a pass down the middle to set Messi romping towards the Stuttgart area. Again, the ball flies clumsily off a Barca peg, the impressive Niedermeier once again on hand to sweep up the danger. 87 min: Khedira takes a desperate shot from the edge of the Barca box. It's blocked and carried clear by Toure, who strides forward, eventually giving the ball to Messi, midway into the Stuttgart half. Messi goes on a long mazy run in search of his hat-trick goal, eventually finding himself just to the left of goal, 12 yards out, with only Lehmann to beat. He chips the keeper - but the effort bounces wide right. 89 min: Iniesta is replaced by the 19-year-old prospect Bojan Krkic. 90 min: WHAT AN INTRODUCTION! Barcelona 4-0 Stuttgart. The ball's shuttled up the middle of the park in a couple of passes, Stuttgart completely knackered. Ibrahimovic rolls it down the inside-left channel to break what is left of the Stuttgart offside trap, Bojan racing clear and clipping the ball past the stranded Lehmann and into the net with his first touch . FULL TIME: Barcelona 4-0 Stuttgart. And that, Europe, is that. If they keep playing like this, Barcelona are going to be lifting their European Cup at the home of Real Madrid in May. And nobody should be writing off Argentina for the World Cup either, Manager Maradona or no, because Lionel Messi... oh my.