LIGA CHAMPIONS: Real Madrid vs Manchester United 2-1, Ronaldo Cs Lolos dengan Aggregate 3-2

Gol bunuh diri Sergio Ramos

JAKARTA—Real Madrid berhasil mengatasi tuan rumah Manchester City dengan skor 2-1 pada pertandingan babak 16 besar Liga Champions leg-2 dini hari ini, Rabu (6/3/2013).
Dengan demikian, Cristiano Ronaldo dan kawan-kawan lolos ke perempat final atau babak 8 besar dengan aggregate 3-2, karena tiga pekan lalu laga Real Madrid vs  Manchester United berlangsung seri 1-1 di Stadion Santiago Bernabue, kandang Real Madrid.
Yang unik dalam pertandingan leg-2 dini hari ini, ketiga skor pertandingan 2-1 tersebut seluruhnya diciptakan oleh pemain Real Madrid.
Data Live Match Uefa.com menyebutkan pertandingan babak pertama berakhir 0-0 tanpa gol kendati Real Madrid menguasai pertandingan dengan penguasaan bola  61%, sedangkan Manchester United hanya 39%.
Gol perdana pertandingan itu terjadi ketika  babak kedua baru berjalan 3 menit melalui gol bunuh diri pemain Real Madrid Sergio Ramos menit  48 babak kedua.
Kegembiraan MU atas gol tersebut terusik dengan hadiah kartu merah yang diberikan wasit asal Turki Cuneyt Cakir kepada Nani pada menit 56.
Hal itu sangat mempengaruhi kekuatan Manchester United. Sementara itu, pelatih Real Madrid Jose Mourinho melihat celah tersebut dengan memasukkan Luka Modric dan menarik Arbeloa pada menit 59.
Modric  membayar kepercayaan itu dengan menciptakan gol pada menit 66, yang membuat skor menjadi imbang 1-1 dan aggregate menjadi 2-2. Dalam posisi seperti ini, Real Madrid berada di atas angin kalau toh harus melalui perpanjangan waktu, karena mempunyai 1 pemain lebih banyak dari MU.
Sebaliknya, Manchester United justru berada di bawah tekanan. Malapetaka bagi MU terjadi 3 menit setelah gol  Modric, yaitu pada menit 69 melalui sang bintang Real Madrid, Cristiano Ronaldo.
Skor pun menjadi 2-1 dan aggregate pertandingan menjadi 3-1 untuk Real Madrid. Pelatih Ferguson melakukan rotasi total dengan memasukkan 3  pemain secara beruntun guna mengejar ketinggalan.
Wayne Rooney masuk menggantikan  Cleverly (menit 73), kemudian disusul Yooung menggantikan Welbeck (81), dan Valencia menggantikan Rafael (87).
Namun hal itu ternyata tidak mengubah keadaan karena  berbagai serangan ke gawang Real Madrid dipatahkan dengan cemerlang oleh penjaga gawang Real Madrid, Diego Lopez .
Hingga tambahan waktu 5 menit yang diberikan wasit Cakir, MU tetap tidak mampu  melesakkan gol tambahan ke gawang Real Madrid, sehingga pertandingan berakhir 2-1 untuk kemenangan Real Madrid.
Real Madrid otomatis lolos ke babak perempat final atau 8 besar Liga Champions dengan aggregate kemenangan 3-2.

Susunan Pemain Manchester United
David de Gea; Rafael (Valencia 87), Rio Ferdinand, Nemanja Vidic, Patrice Evra; Michael Carrick, Tom Cleverley (Rooney 73); Nani, Danny Welbeck (Young 81), Ryan Giggs; Robin van Persie.


Susunan Pemain Real Madrid
Diego Lopez; Alvaro Arbeloa (Modric 59), Raphael Varane, Sergio Ramos, Fabio Coentrao; Xabi Alonso, Sami Khedira; Angel Di Maria (Kaka 45+1), Mesut Ozil (Pepe 71), Cristiano Ronaldo; Gonzalo Higuain.

Arsenal vs Spurs: 5 Predictions for the North London Derby

Gareth Bale Will Open the Scoring

You'd be hard pressed to find a footballer currently in better form than Tottenham Hotspur's Gareth Bale.
In his last six matches in all competitions, the Welshman has scored eight goals, most of which have been spectacular. In Spurs' Europa League win over Olympique Lyon, Bale scored two stunning free kicks to carry his team to a 2-1 victory.
Just recently, his brace against West Ham in a 3-2 Premier League win saw him score a 30-yard screamer in the 90th minute to seal all three points.
For Arsenal supporters, the prospect of Bale coming up against a shaky Arsenal defense is truly terrifying. With Carl Jenkinson likely to play at right back in the absence of Bacary Sagna, it could be a long 90 minutes for the 21-year-old.
With the type of form Bale has been in, it's hard to see him not scoring.

Duel Panas Arsenal vs Tottenham Demi Liga ChampionArsenal vs Tottenham Hotspur

North London Derby antara Tottenham Hotspurs dan Arsenal selalu berlangsung panas dan dalam atmosfer tinggi. Dua tim asal London utara merupakan rival sejati. Dan tensi derby pada Minggu (3/3) WIB makin tinggi karena berbalut perebutan tiket ke Liga Champion, yang merupakan kompetisi Eropa paling bergengsi.
Pada derby kali ini kedua tim memiliki misi yang sama yakni memperebutkan tiket Liga Champion untuk musim depan. Saat ini Spurs masih unggul atas Arsenal di papan klasemen. Gareth Bale dkk bercokol di posisi ketiga dengan perolehan 51 poin, sedangkan Jack Wilshere dkk berada di urutan kelima dengan selisih empat poin.
Maka hasil dari pertandingan ini akan sangat berpengaruh terhadap perjalanan kedua tim menuju masa akhir kompetisi paling glamor di ranah Inggris tersebut. Well, kemenangan menjadi sangat krusial.
Jika Spurs menang, kans mereka ke Liga Champion makin besar. Sebaliknya perjalanan Arsenal semakin terjal. Sedang tambahan tiga angka akan menipiskan jarak Arsenal, sekaligus memperketat persaingan dengan Spurs dan Chelsea.
"Saya suka derby. Ini akan menjadi pertandingan yang sulit, tapi kami ingin meraih tiga poin karena kami memiliki kualitas untuk menang di sana," kata striker Arsenal, Lukas Podolski, di situs resmi klub.
The Gunners musim ini berhasil memetik 13 kali kemenangan, delapan kali hasil seri, dan enam kali kalah. Kesempatan mereka untuk menjuarai Premier League sudah dipastikan tertutup setelah tertinggal 21 poin (bahkan bisa 24 poin) dari pemuncak klasemen Manchester United dengan sisa pertandingan hanya 11 laga.
Kedatangan Arsenal ke markas Spurs sebenarnya bukan dalam kondisi terbaik. Manajer Arsene Wenger tengah mendapat sorotan tajam menyusul serangkaian hasil buruk sebelumnya. Arsenal terlempar dari Piala FA setelah secara mengagetkan kalah dari tim semenjana Blackburn Rovers. Mereka pun terancam tereliminasi dari Liga Champions setelah kalah 1-3 dari Bayern Muenchen pada leg pertama 16 besar.
Itu artinya peluang Arsenal untuk mengakhiri kompetisi tanpa gelar tampaknya masih akan berlanjut hingga memasuki tahun kedelapan.
Maka target lolos ke Liga Champion musim depan kini jadi target paling realistis yang harus digapai Arsenal. Jika sampai gagal, maka ini akan jadi presiden terburuk bagi Arsenal dalam satu dekade terakhir.
Arsenal sebenarnya masih punya peluang untuk finis di posisi empat jika mampu memertahankan performa di Premier League. Mereka memenangkan tiga laga Premier League terakhir dan belum pernah kalah dalam lima laga setelah mengalahkan Aston Villa 2-1 pada 23 Februari 2013.
Dan Wenger sebenarnya punya alasan kuat untuk membawa skuadnya menang di kandang Spurs setelah mereka tercatat sebagai tim yang paling sedikit kebobolan, hanya 11 gol dalam 13 laga ditambah lagi daya serang The Gunners yang masih kuat.
"Kami selalu konsiten dan kuat ketika menjalani pertandingan away, kami punya rekor pertahanan bagus ketika menjalani laga away sebab kami mampu menyerang dengan bagus. Statistik itu akan membantu kami untuk mengulanginya lagi," ujar Wenger.
Santi Cazorla adalah salah satu mesin gol Arsenal dengan 11 gol telah dicetaknya musim ini. Selain itu Theo Walcott juga kian menjadi andalan Arsenal di lini depan. Empat gol dicetak Walcott dalam empat pertandingan terakhir ke gawang Spurs. Walcott pastinya ingin mengulang kemenangan 5-2 Arsenal atas Spurs pada pertemuan pertama kedua tim.

ARSHENE WENGER : KEMENANGAN PENTING

 London - Usai menuai kekalahan di dua pertandingan terakhir, Arsenal akhirnya sukses meraih kemenanga melawan Aston Villa. Pelatih Arsene Wenger pun menyebut kemenangan ini sangat penting untuk menaikkan moral bertanding timnya.

Usai disingkirkan Blackburn Rovers dari ajang Piala FA, Arsenal pada Rabu (22/2/2013) dinihari WIB tumbang 3-1 di kandang sendiri kala bersua Bayern Munchen di leg pertama babak 16 besar Liga Champions.

Namun, pasukan The Gunners mampu merespon kekalahan itu dengan baik. Menjamu Aston Villa di Emirates Stadium, Sabtu (3/2/2013) malam WIB, Arsenal menang tipis 2-1.

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Preview: Arsenal vs. Aston Villa

Arsenal return to Premier League action against Aston Villa on Saturday having lost their last two matches in the FA Cup and Champions League respectively.

The Gunners claimed a fortuitous 1-0 win last time in the league against Sunderland and are looking to close afour-point gap to Tottenham Hotspur, who are fourth.

Tom Fox and Ivan Gazidis meet president Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono

Arsenal to visit Indonesia in summer 2013

Arsenal Football Club is delighted to announce that the first-team squad will play a match in Jakarta, Indonesia during the summer of 2013.
The match will see the Club return to Asia following two highly-successful pre-season tours in the region over the past two years. It will be the first time that the Club has visited Indonesia since 1983.
Confirming the trip to Indonesia, Arsenal chief executive Ivan Gazidis presented Indonesian president Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono with a personalised Arsenal shirt at No 10 Downing Street as part of a state visit to the UK.
Ivan Gazidis said: “Everyone at Arsenal is extremely excited to once again be visiting Asia and travelling to Indonesia for what will be the Club’s first visit to the country in 30 years.
"We know that Arsenal enjoy fantastic support in Indonesia and we are all looking forward to bringing the Club closer to these loyal fans and learning more about the country’s rich heritage and culture.”

Arsenal need belief, says Theo Walcott after Bayern Munich mauling

Arsenal have plenty of talent but it is hard for the team to move forward if they cannot hang on to their best players

Jack Wilshere takes on Bayern Munich's David Alaba during Arsenal's 3-1 Champions League defeat. Photograph: John Sibley/Action Images

There were those who asked themselves the question before Arsenal's Champions League last-16 first-leg tie against Bayern Munich, at roughly the same time as Arsène Wenger, his words dripping with contempt, took the media to task at his explosive press conference: how many of the Arsenal squad would make it into the Bayern team?
By 9.30 on Tuesday night, the question needed to be reworded: would any Arsenal player make it into this Bayern team, the one that resembled a machine, whose parts clicked seamlessly and whose power was, frankly, intimidating? Jack Wilshere would vie for selection and the thing that elevated his gutsy performance was that he frequently resembled a one-man band. Arsenal's No10 did not have the support of a Bastian Schweinsteiger or Javi Martínez or Toni Kroos.
And that, folks, is it. On the evidence of 90 minutes when Bayern seized on Arsenal's first wobble to take such a stranglehold that it felt as though they came to play a little within themselves, the difference between the clubs prompted two more questions. For Arsenal it was not so much the 3-1 defeat – hardly unexpected – rather, how had they come to lag so far behind one of Europe's elite clubs? Secondly, and perhaps more urgently, how do they pick themselves up to ensure they are not cast further adrift?
Forget the second leg in Munich on 13 March; Arsenal's season has distilled into 12 Premier League matches, beginning at home to Aston Villa on Saturday, in which they must make up the four points on fourth-placed Tottenham Hotspur that currently separate them from readmission to the Champions League. The good news is that they are against teams on their level, apart from the fixture with Manchester United, who have long since galloped into the distance and might even arrive at the Emirates Stadium on 28 April as champions.
And so it will boil down to whether Arsenal can rise above the suffocating tension to express the talent they possess. One of the many paradoxes about this squad is that, according to Wenger, they have tremendous mental strength, the ability to recover from setbacks, and ignore the background chatter and analyses of the many pundits and experts for whom he has developed such distaste. And yet these are the players who cannot seemingly begin to play with freedom until they are a goal or more behind.
Wenger said on Monday that Arsenal's slow starts were caused by "psychological" factors, which he did not want to go into, but it is alarming, to say the least, to hear a manager highlight such an area of weakness. In this calendar year the team has conceded first-half leads in five of its seven league fixtures. Bayern were 2-0 up after 21 minutes.
The talk from the Arsenal dressing room took in the need to learn from what went wrong on Tuesday, even if it seemed to be an old chestnut that remained uncracked. The thought also occurred that knowledge alone might not have been, nor will be, enough against the Germans.
There was soul-searching, particularly on the issue of the first-half concessions, and an element of helplessness. Theo Walcott, one of the few players who has consistently shown character this season, made the point that the team had actually looked sharp at the very outset. But Kroos's seventh-minute opener had stemmed from Arsenal sloppiness, which has been the recurrent, jarring theme.
"It's hard to get it because it's happening most weeks," Walcott said. "We didn't really have a slow start, it was just sloppy goals … goals that could have been avoidable, I felt. We've got some great talent in that dressing room. It's just putting it all into one bowl."
The message was that it was futile to dwell on the defeat; heads needed to be raised as big games loomed. After Villa it is the derby at Tottenham. "We've just got to start believing again," Walcott said. "I think that's one of the main things – believe in how good we are, because we didn't show it against Bayern."
Arsenal will surely be no better than a top-four team with no trophies for another season and it is the glass ceiling of the fair-to-middling, of the merely passable, that has drawn supporters' ire. To some of them Wenger has set the bar high and is now falling below what is expected. The Frenchman's win percentage in all competitions of 47.5% is his lowest since 1996-97, his debut season at the club, when it was 44.4%.
The psychological reasons are one thing but, when a club sells its best players for massive money and signs new ones in the £10m-£13m bracket at best, it is difficult to move forward, let alone reach for the stars.
Arsenal bemoaned how their hands were tied over the sales of Robin van Persie last summer and those of Samir Nasri and Cesc Fábregas in 2011, in that the players made it plain that they wanted to leave and, in the case of the first two, had entered the final year on their contract. The cash raised totalled £77m but it did not entirely compensate for what the deals said about the club's ambition or foresight. Alex Song also departed last summer for £15m.
It is the manner in which funds have been invested, or otherwise, that has been as much of a problem. The summer of 2011 saw Wenger change tack on the transfer market, as he sought more seasoned professionals such as Per Mertesacker and Mikel Arteta. Last time out he signed Lukas Podolski, Olivier Giroud and Santi Cazorla. Each one has been good, sometimes very good; Cazorla has shown flickers of real inspiration. But none of them feels like a player from the top echelon or, to put it another way, a player who would make the Bayern team.
Then there are the mistakes, such as Andrey Arshavin, Sébastien Squillaci, Gervinho, André Santos, Park Chu-young and Marouane Chamakh; the last three number among the players Arsenal have out on loan.
Wenger has money to spend, pots of it, but he has ignored the clamour to make a £20m-plus statement signing, which could energise the squad as much as the supporters. One generally gets what one pays for these days but there is the fear that, if Arsenal do not make next season's Champions League, they could struggle to attract players with over-the-odds offers.
Wilshere, meanwhile, has targets that are loftier than a top-four finish – and the ability to fulfil them. He will not tread water at Arsenal indefinitely.
Arsenal rarely enjoy respite from pressure. The coming weeks will be of huge significance for the club.