Hello, everybody, and welcome to another fabulous episode of The Total Soccer Show.

I'm your host, Taylor Rockwell, as you can no doubt tell for me doing the introduction. Daryl Grove is not with me today. He is instead still in Michigan. He will be back next week. Until then, he will be on the show doing a listener questions episode, as we are wont to do. We'll be doing that later on in the week. But for now, I'm going to be talking a little La Liga. We've got El Classico right around the corner, recorded this show on Tuesday, publishing it on Tuesday, El Classico Wednesday afternoon to help me make sense of that clash and all to expect there. I'm talking to Graham Ruffman of Eurosport and many other publications. Graham has been on the show previously. He will be on the show again because he is always wonderful. But we get into sort of the strengths and weaknesses of both teams as they head into El Classico, more so the vulnerabilities for Round Madrid, since they've got more injuries and a significant number more question marks for that one. But we talk about Gareth Bale, the situation overall at Madrid, more so than just like where is G Gareth Bail going to go next, although we do talk about that. But sort of his standing within the club, because it's been a strange season, we talk about how Hattafé have been so good and at Lettie so poor and why that is the case, the next big manager who could come out of Spain, and then obviously we talk a bit about the Champions League. The draw has happened.

The knockout round is set.

Four Spanish teams remain.

They've got varying degrees of opponents they're going to be facing from very, very, very, very, very world class to mostly world class.

So Graham gives his thoughts on all those draws on everything else, La Liga.

So I will stop introducing that conversation and instead say, with me once again to talk all things La Liga and a little Champions League. It's Mr. Graham Ruthfin of Eurosport. Graham, thank you very much for taking the time to make yet another appearance. That is. No problem at all, Taylor. It's always good to be on. Yeah, and it's a big one this week. We've got a midweek classical, which was, I don't know if this was the one that was initially scheduled, but there's been some rescheduling due to political situations. Can we start there? Why is this being played midweek? Because usually with a classical, you'd expect it to be very hyped up on a weekend for prime viewing instead we've got it Wednesday afternoon why is that

the case yeah so this game was originally scheduled for i think it was late october i believe and it

was a a saturday or a sunday game as you would as you would expect normally to be the case

and then the political situation in spain and cataloniaared up again, as has been the case for a number of years now.

There were a number of pro-independence figures arrested by Spanish authorities,

and obviously that was extremely inflammatory and controversial.

And then from that came concerns that the match at the camp now would descend into,

I suppose, political demonstration and protests.

And so the decision was taking somewhat controversially.

This wasn't a unanimously made decision to postpone the match.

But there was still this urgency that they wanted to,

because of the winter break in Spain, that splits the season very deliberately into two to separate

parts, and so they wanted the class code done before the end of that first half. And so this was

pretty much, obviously, with the Champions League last week,

pretty much the only time that they could schedule the match. And even as we're talking now a day

before the game, there's still some reports that maybe this game might be a little bit under

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