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The Basque striker is determined to cap an impressive European campaign by beating Atletico Madrid in Wednesday's final in Bucharest
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The Champions League finalist will look to cap off a wonderful week with victory over Bruno Labbadia's outfit at the Allianz Arena on Saturday afternoon.
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The Daily goes through all the news from a busy weekend in MLS.
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Dundee United signed 21-year-old Liverpool youth team wash-out Gary Mackay-Steven from second-division Airdrie United last summer and the winger has been a revelation for the club in just his first season. Winning the Scottish Premier League Young Player of the Month award for February and earning his first cap for the Scotland U-21 team after scoring and pulling off a breath-taking bit of skill (later dubbed the "Gazgetaway") against St. Johnstone, Mackay-Steven has prompted fans to sing "Are you Messi in disguise?" during matches.
This has not gone unnoticed by his teammates, though. From the Daily Record :
Mackay-Steven said: "I heard the fans chanting and I'm a bit embarrassed because you see what [Lionel] Messi does every week. He's in a league of his own, the best player in the world and possibly ever.
"I like watching Messi because the things he does with the ball are amazing.
"It's nice to hear the fans saying that but it has given the lads in the dressing room plenty of ammunition.
"They give me a lot of stick. They've been calling me Lionel every day. And some of them are even saying they'll be chanting 'GMS' in the Nou Camp soon.
At 5'9", Mackay-Steven is a little taller than Messi. He's also a bit blonder and his Lego collection probably comes nowhere near the size of Messi's. But that's nothing a leg shortening surgery, a little hair dye and a trip to the toy shop can't fix. |
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| Radamel Falcao scored his 20th Spanish league goal of the season as Atletico Madrid cruised past Getafe 3-0 on Sunday. The Colombia striker guided home Juanfran Torres' cross in the 77th minute to cap an easy victory at the Vicente Calderon stadium. Atletico got going in the 24th as Eduardo Salvio continued his impressive play with the Argentine forward heading Filipe Luis' cross high over... |
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| The Mexican grabbed a brace to cap off a dominant performance after Jonny Evans, Antonio Valencia and Danny Welbeck had all but sealed three points in the first half |
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| As a punishment for salary cap shenanigans during the uncapped 2010 season, the Washington Redskins and Dallas Cowboys will lose cap space for 2012 and 2013 .
ESPN reports that the Redskins will lose $36 million and the Cowboys will lose $10 million . They'll be able to spread that over two years, so in the case of the Redskins, with this year's cap of $120.6 million , if they spread it evenly over two years, they lose about 15 percent of their cap space this season. Ouchie.
What the Redskins and Cowboys are accused of doing is structuring contracts so players would receive a disproportionate amount of their money the uncapped 2010 season. The league didn't appreciate their ruse.
And, to ensure that there's still enough money going around to make the union happy, every other team in the league, with the exception of the Raiders and Saints (accused of more minor violations), will get the cap space that the Redskins and Cowboys are giving up.
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| Hello, this is a feature that will run through the entire season and aims to recap the weekend's events and boils those events down to one admittedly superficial fact or stupid opinion about each team. Feel free to complain about it.
Prior to this week's GM meetings, word started to trickle out that the 30 general managers of the NHL were doing the unthinkable: considering the reinstatement of perhaps the single worst, most pointless, counterproductive, and counterintuitive rule the sport of hockey has seen in last 30 years at least.
That's right, it's the return of the red line.
Nick Costonika talked about such a change at length the other day , getting some very choice quotes from guys on both sides of the issue.
The reason for this proposed change, according to advocates of building a wall in the middle of the neutral zone, is that it will slow the game down and make it safer. Concussions are bad!!!!, after all, and anything the league can do to protect players from getting them is of the utmost importance — except, Jake Voracek and Kris Letang recently learned, when it's not.
So the solution is to outlaw stretch passes that, in theory, make the game faster and allow guys to sail through the neutral zone at Mach 3 and get clobbered into next Sunday by 230-pound defensemen.
And yes, by all means, let's do that. When and if that were to ever actually happen. In much the same way that outlawing fighting isn't going to prevent guys from getting these terrible brain injuries because so few guys actually get concussed during them, reinstating the two-line pass won't prevent concussions because two-line passes, as far as I've been able to figure out, have never actually caused one.
You can say allowing stretch plays encourages players to create a faster and therefore more dangerous game, but that's like outlawing steak because a guy choked on it in a restaurant where no one knew the Heimlich.
(Coming Up: Will Columbus trade top pick?; Kings are in trouble; dissecting Brian Burke; Tuukka time will wait for six weeks; Johnny Oduya is working out; Jeff Skinner's nasty snipe; Bruce Boudreau vs. refs; Chris Stewart scored a beauty; fun with Folignos; what's wrong with Alex Ovechkin?; Giroux does the Datsyuk; Grant Besse's awesome night; and a way to get Antti Niemi back to Chicago.)
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Two days before free agency, NFL teams finally got the official ceiling they'll be able to spend on their personnel. The league has set the salary cap at $120.6 million per team, a slight increase over 2011's figure of $120.375 million. That's not an absolute number, though -- per the new collective bargaining agreement, teams are able to roll unused cap money from 2011 into their new figure, and borrow $1.5 million from the 2013 figure to form an adjusted cap. Teams need to be in compliance with the cap at the start of the league year, which is 4:00 p.m. ET on March 13.
What the fixed cap number immediately affects, as Brian McIntyre of Football Outsiders and Mac's Football Blog points out , is the franchise tag cost for each team. The only team that doesn't yet know their franchise tag figure is the New Orleans Saints, who placed the exclusive tender on quarterback Drew Brees. The rules state that while the non-exclusive franchise numbers are decided by a formula that takes in the last five years of tags, exclusive tenders are decided by accruing the numbers for the five-highest paid players at a position at the end of the restricted free agent signing period.
The end of that period is April 20, which places an even larger burden on the Saints to sign Brees to a long-term contract and get that cap number down so they can turn their attention to other key free agents. The 2012 franchise tag number for quarterbacks is $14,436,000, but Brees will get more because of his specific designation. You can read the formula for the non-exclusive franchise tender amount here , but I'd advise a couple of Advil before you dive into that one.
Here are the franchise tag numbers for each position, and the key players who have been franchised:
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| Manchester United, Manchester City and even Tottenham Hotspur have a shot at the EPL. Who is going to win? |
