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2009 Champion’s League Final: Barcelona 2, Manchester United 0

By BehindTheHype.com • on May 28, 2009

Barcelona are Europe’s new club champions.

In the end, Barcelona’s slick passing style was way too much for Manchester United to handle. If you only watched the first five minutes of this game, you would have put all your money on Manchester United to crush Barcelona. But by the end of the game it was the other way around, with Barcelona’s fans shouting “OLE!” every time they completed yet another pass in and around the Manchester United defense.

Eto celebrates his tenth minute goal

In the opening minutes Manchester dominated play, by creating an onslaught on the Barcelona goal. Cristiano Ronaldo and Ji-Sung Park both came close to scoring for Manchester early on. But the game was turned on its head when Barcelona scored against the run of play in the tenth minute. Andres Iniesta ran through the midfield with the ball before slipping a neat pass through to Samuel Eto inside Manchester United’s box. Eto then cut past Nemanja Vidic before stabbing the ball past Edwin van der Sar at the near post. After the goal, Barcelona seized the momentum, and began to boss the game by maintaining possession of the ball. Andres Iniesta and Xavi began to look particularly dominant in midfield. In my preview of the game, I mentioned that if these two players could keep possession of the ball for Barcelona, my guess was that their team would carry the day. By halftime it looked like my hunch was right….