Argentina 1:0 Paraguay - Ratings

1. Pato (6/10)
Solid goalkeeping. Made 2 important saves

2. Ibarra (6/10)
Moved up a lot and made a lot of crosses. Beaten once but solid performance in defence

3. Burdisso (7/10)
Solid in defence. He's the best defender in the game

4. Diaz (6/10)
Very comfortable in defense, but almost gave away for a shot on goal. Other than that he's the calm factor.

5. Zanetti (7/10)
Going up a lot and into the middle. Linked up comfortably with Gago and Aimar

6. Gago (6/10)
Holding up firmly in the middle and good ball distributions

7. Lucho (5/10)
Not much impact from Lucho and made a poor cross when receiving pass from Aimar

8. Cambiasso (5/10)
Solid performance but with no impact

9. Aimar (6/10)
He's fun to watch but his performance was not. He made 1 good pass to Lucho, but other than that, he's either tried to do too much end up losing balls or poor passes to his teammates. He also missed a header crossed by Lucho

10. Palacio (6/10)
Very good ball control and played wide a lot. Managed to hit the bar

11. Tevez (8/10)
He shot a lot and got one that hit the post. He was very active upfront and he's the only one that really threaten Paraguay's defense. That's why he was Man of the Match

12 Mascherano (7/10)
Replaced Lucho and scored his first goal!

13. Messi (7/10)
Replaced Cambiasso and created havocs on Paraguay defense. He changed the game with his freaky acceleration and led to Argentina only goal

14. Ayala (6/10)
Replaced Aimar when Santa Cruz came in and he played sweeper

15. Basile (8/10)
Again, great substitutions. He knows when and who to put in

Paraguay managed to trouble the Argentina defense twice but other than that nothing much to say about the defense because Paraguay didn't show much intention to attack. This allow Ibarra and Zanetti to move up a lot to support the attack. Gago, Cambiasso, Lucho and Aimar were having good time by controlling the midfield with a lot of passes and high tempo plays.

Why did we manage to get only 1 goal when we've created a lot of chances? Could it be due to highly organized Paraguay's defense? Yes, Paraguay's defense could be the reason plus our poor set pieces and wasted crosses due to lacked of heights upfront. But there were 2 major reasons why we didn't do well. 1) We didn't mixed up our tempo. Due to our high tempo, our attacking players didn't performed as a unit. Players were far apart to each other that killed our attacking momentum. Palacio was an example where he was isolated a few times. 2) We didn't try to attack Paraguay's box regularly enough and we lacked bodies inside the box to get grab the opportunities.

It's an entertaining game, no doubt about it. We had lot of passes, 464 of them but not efficient enough.