This weekend’s marquee game is Barcelona’s trip on Saturday to Seville’s Ramon Sanchez Pizjuan, where second-place Sevilla hosts La Liga leaders (TV: GolTV, live, 4 pm ET).
A win would give Barcelona a five-point lead — and a game in hand — and allow it to pull away from Sevilla.
Sevilla has challenged Barca all season but its recent loss of form — it has won just two of their eight league matches in 2007 — has compromised its title hopes.
Barcelona has an equally important important match coming up next Tuesday when it travels to Liverpool, where it goes into the second leg of their UEFA Champions League round-of-16 series trailing, 2-1. Barca has been boosted in recent weeks by the return of African Player of the Year Samuel Eto’o. Reports have surfaced that Liverpool is prepared to spend $39 million to pry Eto’o away from Barcelona for next season.
The buildup to the Sevilla-Barca game has been overshadowed by the injury Sevilla coach Juande Ramos suffered on Wednesday. Ramos was knocked unconscious and briefly hospitalized after being struck by a bottle thrown from the stands at Seville rival Betis’ Manuel Ruiz de Lopera Stadium during their Copa del Rey match.
ENGLAND. English Premier League leader Manchester United will look to continue its impressive form away from home when it travels to Liverpool on Saturday in the first meeting of the clubs since both became American-owned (TV: Setanta Sports USA, live, 7:40 am).
United takes a nine-point lead over defending Premier League champion Chelsea into the game and has 10 wins, two ties and only two losses in 14 away EPL games this season. It’s also been impressive away from Old Trafford in the FA Cup (where it beat Reading, 3-2, in a fifth-round replay on Tuesday) and in the UEFA Champions League (where it won, 1-0, against Lille nine days ago in an incident-packed game, on and off the field, played in the French city of Lens).
Third-place Liverpool has not conceded a goal at Anfield in its last nine league games and is unbeaten at home this season. Americans George Gillett Jr. and Tom Hicks recently took control of Liverpool, while Malcolm Glazer, owner of the NFL’s Tampa Bay Buccaneers, owns Man. United.
Later on Saturday, Chelsea, which has a game in hand on United, plays at Portsmouth (TV: Fox Soccer Channel, live, noon ET).
GERMANY. After breaking away from the pack with a six-game winning streak, German Bundesliga leader Schalke 04 has suddenly gone cold and must face resurgent Hamburg in a key match on Friday (TV: GolTV, live, 2:25 pm ET).
Looking for their first league title since the creation of the Bundesliga, Schalke has earned just a point in its last two matches, a 2-2 tie at Wolfsburg and a 1-0 loss to Bayer Leverkusen at home. The Leverkusen game was costly as Schalke’s Brazilian playmaker, Lincoln, was handed a five-match suspension for a red card received for punching Leverkusen’s Bernd Schneider.
Hamburg has won three in a row under new Dutch coach Huub Stevens and rediscovered his scoring form with eight goals in the three wins to climb out of the relegation zone. HSV is the only founding member of the Bundesliga to never be relegated.
Schalke leads Stuttgart by four points, Werder Bremen (with which it shared the lead at the winter break) by six and Bayern Munich, the defending champion, by nine. Bayern Munich travels to Hertha Berlin (TV: GolTV, live, 9:30 am ET) and Stuttgart plays at Bayer Leverkusen (TV: GolTV, live, 11:30 am ET), while Werder hosts Bochum, all on Saturday.