Mentioning Valdes as an argument why our defense sucks is begging the question or circular logic. Saying our defense would have failed if we had had a worse goalkeeper than Valdes is not a valid argument, as you can't know whether the result would be the same in this case. For all we know, our defense could have played differently with a different keeper.Maybe the knowledge of having an absolute ace goalkeeper influences their play? Maybe Valdes not trusting our defense this season gives him extra motivation to enter beast mode? Not saying this is the case - just wanting to show how this is flawed logic and jumping to conclusions based on nothing.
Last season, Valdes was pretty poor by his standards, yet we had our poorest season defensively in years. Last year, our defence was poor, yet Valdes still had a poor season. It's not flawed logic, if anything your's is flawed logic.
There's goalkeeping, and then there's defending. Dani Alves cannot be excused for his nonchalance, or Adriano cannot be excused from his inability to play the offside trap, or Pique for his poor marking or balance, or for Barca as a team to be god awful at set pieces because Valdes is in the form of his life. And neither is Valdes playing really well because our defence sucked. 2-3 years ago, we had an awesome defence yet Valdes was excellent, perhaps the best goalkeeper in the world. And then there have been years where Valdes has been poor but our defence has been great. My point is they are not very correlated like you may think.
Second, I don't get the point from excluding Valdes from our defense. What's the use of considering our defensive line seperately, what findings does this bring? You might collect some great statistics, come to whatever conclusion and express the quality of a defense in numbers (like those statistics that were posted), but what does this have to do with football? What does this say when obviously, the results speak a different language? Fact is, we have won all of our games with seven clean sheets. Bayern have six clean sheets. We have conceded 6 goals, Bayern 7, and I'm not even counting the two Supercup games, which would make it 7 and 11. Now you might still point out and be of the opinion that our defense sucks, but I don't see the point in that. And I don't think that this is how football works.
Why don't you answer the very simple question that I posed and everyone ignored - would you say that Chelsea were amazing defensively in the CL ties vs Barca a couple of years ago? Or Sevilla vs us in Nov 2011 when Javi Varas played the game of his life?
Bayern have conceded 7 in 12 games while Barca have conceded 6 in 10, if you exclude the supercups (which I usually wouldn't, if the German Supercup were played after the first league match like in Spain this season, then of course I would've counted that too - it's not an excuse for Bayern, it's looking at things in context).
As for the comparison of our game against Gdansk and Bayern's game against Dortmund, we didn't have any of our usual startes except for Messi. Bayern were missing four players - Neuer, Ribery, Schweini and Martinez. So how those two games can be compared simply because they were both in July is beyond me. Also, why acting as if Bayern wouldn't have defensive problems if they played Dortmund now? Bayern are playing with a high line and Dortmund is probably the deadliest team on counters. Dortmund's system is ideal to counter theirs. They will clash soon, so we will see.
That was an ironic comparison and I said so as much. In July, all the teams are still in preseason mode, it doesn't matter if the fixture was "competitive friendly" or a friendly or whatever. FFS Bayern played more preseason tournaments right after the Supercup where Pep was still experimenting with his team.
I don't think anyone has said that Bayern wouldn't have problems against Dortmund if they played now, let alone me who as a huge Dortmund fan knows exactly what's going on in the team and what it's strength and weaknesses are. And maybe DavidVillano1 thinks Bayern are the best defensively atm (even then he seemed unsure and said 'probably'), but nobody here has said that Bayern are amazing defensively. Best atm =/= good.
Regarding the argument that Bayern have faced stronger teams, I don't really think any of their oponents were stronger than Atletico. At least if we take Atletico's winning record (especially considering they defeated RM) as an indicator. So we conceded one goal in two games against them, while Bayern have conceded one to two goals in one game against several weaker oponents (M'Gladbach, Freiburg, Chelsea, Hannover, City, Leverkusen). Of course we conceded goals against weaker oponents as well, but Bayern's stronger oponents can not be an excuse for them, let alone an argument for why they are better, as it's simply not true.
Nobody said Bayern have faced more difficult teams, they're comparable to whom Barca have faced. On the other hand, Bayern do not concede nearly as many basic and easy chances to the opposition as Barca do and you would know this and not argue pointlessly if you watched both teams play.
I don't see anything ridiculous about the reaction to Semi-Neutral's statement. Fact is he tried to show that Barca are best defensively using statistics and was proved wrong. It was an honest mistake and there's nothing wrong with that. But you can't really expect a Barca fan who watched all the games this season to really believe they've been the best in Europe defensively.
More ridiculous is people popping up calling others Bayern fanboys while failing to logic their way through their argument.
