Chelsea facing Barcelona is a huge encounter in the Champions League, with their rich history offering great precedence as to the kind of game to expect on Tuesday.
The Blues will be hoping to find the best recipe to stop some of the most dangerous players in the Barcelona team, and many have pointed to Lionel Messi as the man to stop.
Messi is that good in football, many consider him the greatest player of all time in the sport. However, Fabregas sees someone else as the threat to Chelsea’s chances of making the quarter final of the competition.
Having played with Barcelona for three years after he left Arsenal in 2012, Fabregas knows the Catalunya club so well and has warned his current side to be wary of the ‘intelligence’ of Andres Iniesta.
“He’s still good; for this type of player age doesn’t really matter. Once you have a talent, once you have the class that he and so many other ‘big’ players have, they can play until their late 30s.
Physically, it’s important, obviously because the game nowadays depends a lot on that. But when you have the quality, when you have the intelligence, it can sometimes compensate.”
Cesc Fabregas, Evening Standard
Iniesta is the man who put the final dagger in Chelsea when the two sides met in 2009 and the Blues controversially booted out of the competition. He scored in the dying minutes of the game to give Barcelona the lead on aggregate, after a stalemate in the first leg at Camp Nou.
