Messi blasts 'weak' team after Barcelona loses league title
Barcelona: After seeing Barcelona's Spanish league title defense come to a disappointing and meek end, Lionel Messi didn't hold back.
Messi blasted his team for being weak after Real Madrid wrested the league title away from Barcelona for the first time in three years on Thursday, and said it must quickly change course to have a chance at winning the Champions League.
Real Madrid clinched the title by beating Villarreal 2-1 but would have lifted the trophy regardless of that result after Barcelona slumped to a 2-1 loss to an Osasuna side that finished with 10 men.
This game represents the entire year. We have been an erratic and weak team," Messi said in a rare TV interview just after the final whistle sounded at an empty Camp Nou.
Madrid did its part by winning all its matches, which is impressive, but we also helped them to win this league. We have to be critical of how we have played, starting with the players, and the rest of the club.
Barcelona led the league by two points over Madrid when the league was stopped in mid-March for three months while Spain's reined in its coronavirus outbreak.
Madrid returned to the competition motivated and in shape, reeling off 10 straight wins.
Barcelona looked flat, drew three matches to lose the lead, and on Thursday hit a new low when it lost its first home match since November 2018.
The feeling on this team is that it tries, but that it cannot get the job done, Messi said.
Today in the first half they were better than we were and it seems we have to fall behind to react like we tried to do in the second half.
Messi scored his league-leading 23rd goal from a free kick in the second half to cancel out Jos Arna z's opener.
And Barcelona got a man advantage when the visitors lost substitute Enric Gallego to a straight red card for bloodying the mouth of Clement Lenglet with an elbow to the face in the 77th.
But Osasuna's Roberto Torres scored in stoppage time with Barcelona pushing forward searching for a late goal.
I said it some time ago, that playing like this we had no chance of winning the Champions League, and it turns out we didn't even have enough to win la Liga, Messi said.
We need to take a breather, let some air in, and clean out minds of all that has happened since December. Barcelona must regroup for the second leg of its Champions League round-of-16 match against Napoli on Aug. 8. The first leg finished 1-1 in Italy.
Playing like this we will lose against Napoli," Messi said.
We have to start from zero in the Champions League and blame ourselves for what went wrong.
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Los Angeles county wildfires could be costliest in US history, early estimates say
Los Angeles, Jan 11: The wildfires that erupted this week across Los Angeles County are still raging, but already are projected to be among the costliest natural disasters in US history.
The devastating blazes have killed at least 11 people and incinerated more than 12,000 structures since Tuesday, laying waste to entire neighbourhoods once home to multimillion-dollar properties.
While it's still too early for an accurate tally of the financial toll, the losses so far likely make the wildfires the costliest ever in the US, according to various estimates.
A preliminary estimate by AccuWeather put the damage and economic losses so far between USD 135 billion and USD 150 billion. By comparison, AccuWeather estimated the damage and economic losses caused by Hurricane Helene, which tore across six southeastern states last fall, at USD 225 billion to USD 250 billion.
“This will be the costliest wildfire in California modern history and also very likely the costliest wildfire in US modern history, because of the fires occurring in the densely populated areas around Los Angeles with some of the highest-valued real estate in the country,” said Jonathan Porter, the private firm's chief meteorologist.
AccuWeather factors in a multitude of variables in its estimates, including damage to homes, businesses, infrastructure and vehicles, as well as immediate and long-term health care costs, lost wages and supply chain interruptions.
The insurance broker Aon PLC also said Friday that the LA County wildfires will likely end up being the costliest in US history, although it did not issue an estimate. Aon ranks a wildfire known as the Camp Fire in Paradise, California, in 2018 as the costliest in US history up to now at USD 12.5 billion, adjusted for inflation. The Camp Fire killed 85 people and destroyed about 11,000 homes.
The LA County wildfires, which were fuelled by hurricane-force Santa Ana winds and an extreme drought, remained largely uncontained Saturday. That means the final tally of losses from the blazes is likely to increase, perhaps substantially.
“To put this into perspective, the total damage and economic loss from this wildfire disaster could reach nearly 4 per cent of the annual GDP of the state of California,” AccuWeather's Porter said.
In a report Friday, Moody's also concluded that the wildfires would prove to be the costliest in US history, specifically because they have ripped through densely populated areas with higher-end properties.
While the state is no stranger to major wildfires, they have generally been concentrated in inland areas that are not densely populated. That's led to less destruction per acre, and in damage to less expensive homes, Moody's noted.
That's far from the case this time, with one of the largest conflagrations destroying thousands of properties across the Pacific Palisades and Malibu, home to many Hollywood stars and executives with multimillion-dollar properties. Already, numerous celebrities have lost homes to the fires.
“The scale and intensity of the blazes, combined with their geographic footprint, suggest a staggering price tag, both in terms of the human cost and the economic toll,” Moody's analysts wrote. The report did not include a preliminary cost estimate of the wildfire damage.
It could be several months before a concrete tally of the financial losses from the wildfires will be possible.
“We're in the very early stages of this disaster,” Porter said.
