Ramos is also meh defensively and also a thug, just slightly less awful than Pepe in that regard. He's WAY to hot headed to be a top CB, he rushes out, makes bad tackles constantly, does all kinds of stupid things, at right back you can get away with doing that. He's a crazy powerful runner good in the air(though uses his elbows constantly in a nasty way), one of the best threats in the box at offensive set pieces but CB, meh.
Varane is better than both, or he was last year, if he can maintain and/or improve he could be one of the best CB's around for years to come.
Spurs should do everything in their power to leverage him into a deal for Bale if they can. Not least because he'll probably be a 50mil CB in the future.
AS for Villa, Barca let players go for cheap, so do Real, particularly if its a player who has done well for them, is well liked but just didn't get enough chances. No need to upset all of Villa's Spanish team mates by making it difficult for him to leave.
His movement is great and much like Cesc, he was making dozens of runs which got ignored in favour of Inieta and Xavi passing to each other for no reason. If Barca were playing with a better mix of football and making more throughballs like Cesc was using to rip them to shreds yesterday, Villa would have scored crap loads of goals. The team played a very specific way though ,slow, slow, slow PASS IT TO MESSI.
Anyone who thinks he was poor last season needs their head checked.
Lets have a little look, 17 league games started, 10 goals, 5 assists, with very few games being in a row, very little form and rarely (if ever) playing the full 90 minutes,
He did great in the league last year, 5 goals in the Spanish cup, 2 for Spain. 3 goals and 2 assists in 1 start and 2 sub appearances in the confed cup over summer. Sorry but, he was banging them in, with mostly only his lack of minutes on the pitch keeping his goal scoring rate down. The previous season 5 goals/1 assist in 8 starts in the league, plenty more in other competitions for club and country.
For the record, his first season at Barca in the league he got 18 goals at a rate of one goal for every 7.4 shots, at Valencia the year before with 21 goals he had one goal for every 6.6 shots, last year he got a goal for every 4.5 shots......
he's playing a different role, for a different team that was and is entirely focused on getting Messi goals. His shooting was top notch, better than any time in the previous 4-5 years, his movement is top notch, he was assisting well, his interplay was good.
he went to Atletico cheaply because, they are basically the only other team in the league that could afford a high wage player(everyone else being bankrupt and having no consistent european footie money coming in), Barca didn't make it difficult because they would have angered about 80% of the team that love Villa, and Villa did his best in every game and sacrificed his own game to benefit Messi and the team in general.
