First off, we have a pretty big project started, so don’t forget to read about it and then email your submissions as soon as possible.

-It is with a heavy heart that I bring you all news of Eric Abidal’s thigh injury that could rule him out for up to two months. Even given his extraordinary recovery capacity, he will be out for a while, having, as I understand it at the moment, torn an adductor muscle in his left leg. That’s a fairly severe injury, especially to have sustained in practice and I’m hoping that the immediate fears pf a long recovery are proven unfounded after more tests are done. In a comment, Kevin pointed out that the matches Abidal is expected to miss are: @ATM, Racing, @Malaga, Valencia (home), @Zaragoza, Osasuna, @Mallorca, Athletic Bilbao. That is not such a bad run to miss if you’re going to miss an 8 match section. The problem is that we’ve also got Stuttgart home and away in the CL during that stretch.

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For all you fans out there, here’s a note from reader Patrick:

While I’d like to think my biggest contribution to our little community is distracting Isaiah via gchat—for some reason he seems to trust my aesthetic opinion. It’s a terrible mistake, but one that you’ve all made too, so ha!

With that said, the powers that be approached me last week about ideas for a new background for the site. While I can understand if you’ve grown a bit attached to our awesome lightning-bolt-circles-winged-gift-from-god-Messi, change is good. Besides, I like excuses to not work that involve my beloved club. So I took up the challenge and came up with 3-4 truly terrible ideas. True, some of them looked cool. But, none of them ended up being very unique.

Then I got an idea. An awful idea. That is to say I got an awfully wonderful idea. But to implement it, I need your help.

See, one of the reasons why I love this club—and this site—is because of the wonderful culés I get to meet and interact with on a daily basis. What would our lives be like without getting Hectored in the comments, liveblogging, or reading just about anything soccermom thinks to write. So I want to integrate all of you, my fellow readers and writers, into the design. To do this in the way that I think will work best, I need pictures. Lots of pictures. Several hundred to be precise.

The pictures can be of you be rocking the colors, visiting Barcelona, watching the game at a bar, showing off your scarf collection, or even reading this blog. They can even be pictures of your home city, the camp nou, or the rave/party/riot you may or may not have participated in after that last trophy win. Get creative. Have some fun. I’ve posted some examples of myself below so you can see what I want. Feel free to send multiple different images. All images should be sent to BFbackground@gmail.com .

As a final note, I want to assure you of the respect I have for your privacy and the seriousness with which I will approach the use of these photos. They will not be put to any other use, nor will they be posted anywhere on the internet. As soon as they are no longer needed, they will be deleted from my hard-drive and the email account used to collect them will be deleted as well. The basic technique I will use is called photomosaic so even when they ARE used, the image will be small enough that you don’t have to worry about any possible privacy infringement, or the bags under your eyes from staying up all night reading about Barça.

Thanks!
Patrick

I hope everyone had a good weekend, or at least a better one than Pique and Marquez. Hopefully your buddies/life partner/imaginary friends bailed you out and despite your horrid tackles, you were able to come away with all 3 points. I had a good enough time trying to find a place to watch the match–we went first to Woodwork (whose name I suddenly understood as I walked from the subway to there in the cold), but they apparently don’t have ESPN Deportes despite promising me on the phone before that they would have the match. So then we returned to my house and watched the match on the DVR, which was fun. Damn you, DirectTV and your nonsensical positioning of ESPN Deportes in a different package than all other things. Also something happened in Miami. You may have noticed. So a pretty good weekend, yeah.

To the random things we keep track of on this site…

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Watch and love.

Miku and Soldado have no idea what’s going on.

It's you, baby! It's you, all day and all night!

How excellent it was that this glorious moment, captured after the goal that, in effect, put this match away for good, features two of our best players, on a day in which everybody who took to the pitch was very good, and in some cases magnificent.

This was right after the second try that Messi had at feeding Xavi, the successful one, for a butter-smooth goal that came off a counterattack that was kick-started by the man people love to hate these days, Rafa Marquez, who was having one hell of a match. But more about that later. For now ….
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Heya! Because none of us are going to be in our houses during this match, we’re unable to run a Liveblog. If you would like to run it, please let me know ASAP and I’ll post it for you. Otherwise, use this as your comments post about the match at hand.

I’ll be posting starting lineups before heading out to Woodwork to meet up with my minipenya.

Creeeepyyyyy

Liga Preview: Barça – Getafe, Saturday 2pmEST, ESPN Deportes

Getafe. They of the Burger King shirts, of the “we’re tots second best in the capital now that Patetico sucks again”, of the inclination to drawing or beating the big boys. Welcome to our humble home, azulones. The last time we met, we ended up with a fairly lucky 0-2 victory with goals by Ibra and Messi. It was the second match of the year in La Liga and provided us with a measure of confidence ahead of our trip to Milan three days later for the first Champions League group stage match. It also catapulted us to the top of the league, where we have remained since, dominating most statistical categories and ever-so-slowly increasing our lead over Real Madrid.

Getafe are not one to do their Madrileño rivals a favor, but they’re in it for themselves first and foremost and with a European position on the line every time they take the field (they’re 3 points behind 6th-placed Depor and one point ahead of 8th placed Athletic Bilbao), they will not be taking this match off. They are looking, as always, to plunge their icy Morgul blades of reality into our backs in an attempt to keep us from running away with the title by mid March and to keep us on our toes, one horrible LotR reference at a time (see title for first one).

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Muniesa (upper left) and Dalmau (bottom left) watching the Messias.

I haven’t had my Barça fix in two full weekends. I haven’t had the blaugrana flashing around on screen since they beat 4-0. That was 18 days ago. Eighteen days. I feel like it’s the height of summer and I have nothing left in the tank, no more ability to aguantar this insanity. But it’s coming, this tide of fury and passion. And, if you’re lucky enough, you’ll be able to experience it with me as I’m looking to head to a new bar here in Brooklyn to test out the waters. It’s called Woodwork and perhaps it will become my stomping grounds for when Nevada Smiths is too far or the subway is messed up.

Regardless, there is news afoot and it must be discussed.

-Because of Carles Puyol’s impending suspension for accumulation of yellow cards and Eric Abidal’s and Dani Alves’ respective injuries, we will probably see a very uncharacteristic back four against Getafe on Saturday (2pmEST, 8pm local). Normally when Alves is out, we rotate Puyol to the RB position, but that is obviously not possible this time around, so canteranos Marc Muniesa and Albert Dalmau have been called up to first team training this week. Muniesa, if you remember, is a promising youngster whose first official appearance for the squad was against Osasuna last year and ended with a straight red, though he is still considered to be one of the better prospects to emerge from the cantera in quite a while and he’s still only 17. Muniesa did not train with the squad today, but Dalmau, who is also 17, did.

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Hey, it’s been a while since I updated all of you on Fantasy Soccer. Just in case you missed it, we’ve got a competition going through Yahoo!’s Fantasy section. Here is our group (you might have to log in to see it, but the ID is 1037).

To the info: There’s hardly anything to report. There is nothing going on here. Nothing whatsoever — sob — nothing. I’m not in horrible, horrible 19th place or anything. I’m not that far behind player Hat Trick who has 1,071.5 points compared to my 827.00, but I’ve only got 18 more weeks to make up the difference!*

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