Copa Del Rey 2012: Athletic Bilbao Will Expose Barcelona in Close Match

Athletic Bilbao is the David to Barcelona’s Goliath. Barcelona is a juggernaut football club with arguably the greatest player on the planet in Lionel Messi.

Most pundits and fans believe that Athletic Bilbao is completely over-matched for the Friday match, and they’re probably right. In fact, some writers believe that Barcelona will mop the floor with Athletic.

But what if, for one match, that wasn’t the case?

Contrary to taking the easy way out by saying Barcelona will comfortably win the match 2-0 or 3-0, while spending 90 percent of the match on the attack, it’s more fun to make some bold (and I do mean bold) predictions.

First off, if Athletic competes in a close match and makes Barcelona fans sweat bullets for the length of it, the match will have been an embarrassment for Barcelona.

They’re a vastly superior football club that should put the pedal to the floor and show what their capable of doing on the field as a unit.

Barcelona’s main goal scorer, Lionel Messi, racked up 50 La Liga goals this season. Athletic’s leading goal scorer, Fernando Llorente, had just 17 goals. Messi had nearly three times the amount of goals as Athletic’s leading scorer, which puts this matchup into perspective.

With that said, I think the match will be much closer than what many expect. I predict that Barcelona will win the game, but only by a 1-0 or even a 2-1 margin.

Additionally, unless Barcelona scores more than one goal on Friday, I predict that goal to be scored by someone other than Lionel Messi.

If Barcelona comes out in this match and fails to jump all over Athletic, they may get frustrated, start to press the issue and play stiff. If that happens, Athletic could become dangerous as they gain much needed confidence.

In a match earlier this year against Athletic, Barcelona won 2-0 behind goals from Messi and Andrés Iniesta.

Athletic can learn from that experience and make the match closer this time around. If they do so, they’ll manage to raise a lot of eyebrows by exposing a brutally tough Barcelona team.

You never know, if Athletic can pull a rabbit out of their hat and score a quick goal, they may protect a lead and shock the world. We'll have to wait and see.