Xavi’s Barca mistakes that are repeated in every game and are harbingers | Relief
In football, results can be consulted to find answers or ask questions. In the first case Victories will cover everything, but defeats will leave nothing to hold on to., a results-oriented vision that will prevent any long-term growth, even if it serves as morphine for the time being. In the second case, the results may not give integer answers, but decimal ones, and this is where in this endless number of possibilities where the coach has to work to separate the valuable from the temporary. What is important from what is indirect. Xavi doesn’t seem to have any football answers to the results, but he also doesn’t have any questions for moving to the next level.
Ancelotti’s Real Madrid crushed Barca without even having a great game. It was enough for him to see the difficulty of the exam that lay ahead of him. At the press conference, Xavi insisted on what had been happening all season: “Things are not going very well for us. We didn’t handle the pressure well, we worked on their movement and they scored two goals in the first 10 minutes by attacking our back.”“It’s amazing because after every meeting Javi points out the mistakes that always repeat themselves, the gray self-criticism, because you never know where he’s really going.
The invisible structure of Barça
The Clasico was a concise and precise summary of Barça’s major “mistakes” this season. Although Xavi recently noted that “we are playing better than last year,” the truth is that his team has left very little sign of everything that led them to victory in La Liga last year. With numerous sacrifices preventing Barca from repeating what they did and signings forcing them to rethink the plan, Xavi sees things moving backwards in a worrying regression that is no longer new. The Super Bowl is a sign of the whole season.
Defensively, Barca are a very bad team. No mechanisms. No structure. Unable to tell the opponent where to go, always defending himself against the opponent’s intentions, as if chasing shadows. The team lives in constant flooding, and when they manage to drain the water from their home, they see that the only thing it really does is cause every liter that comes out to come back in from the other side.
If a team is defending far away, it is necessary for each line to react to the stimulus of the one in front of it. If my partner leaves, I leave. But there it is important to know when, how and with whom. Barca didn’t know, or didn’t seem to know.
In the 5th minute, Barça had already neglected what had hurt them all season. This is a team that cannot play forward without the ball.n, in which its players move by inertia, with little control over everything that happens around them. Instead of minimizing Real’s weapons, Barça strengthened them to such an extent that every game in which Real Madrid stole the ball could end in a 1v1 match against Pena. The same thing happened against Girona, when Michel’s men gave the feeling that they could score whenever they wanted, exploiting the huge holes in the defense of a team that was always ready.
Defending your forward line is always the consequence of many previous good actions. Never a starting point. Putting him first just because you say you’re defending yourself bravely is like buying a Ferrari without having the money first. This is a useless mortgage. whim. In a 2-0 game, the team starts with an advantage as Real Madrid serves from their zone, and with all the time on the organization, it is decided not to put pressure on Carvajal, opening a vertical pass to the unmarked Rodrigo.
10 minutes was enough to watch the same old movie. But what saved Barça was that they did not always face players of this level. Where did the top two teams in La Liga fall: partial score 4-10, three defeats and a lot of difficulties with control of what is happening on the green. Javi pays attention to details, occasions and moments, and sometimes forgets the whole image. That no matter how much a team reaches the opponent’s zone, the opponent only needs two passes to do it in his own.
Another one of the most sensitive points for Barça is that they do not control the depth and height at which they want to defend.R. He simply does it where his opponent allows him. Being so poorly structured and with so few players responding to incentives, Barca loses meters and ends up bottlenecked, oblivious to detail and making it easier for the opposition to play their front line. The score 3-1 is created in this way. When holding White for almost two minutes.
Real Madrid’s two under-1.75 scorers to Barca’s four defenders, three of whom dominate aerial play. And the game ends with a penalty. Araujo was amazed because he was not protecting anyone. Ancelotti released the striker and stunned the Uruguayan centre-back, who was left without his partner. was forced to make long runs at a disadvantage and wasted energy on penalties. He did not correct it throughout the game, despite Real’s insistence on constantly destroying the central space, forgetting about the lateral depth.
“We needed to make tactical fouls to stop them running.”– Xavi said after the match. The problem is that Javi may think more about the last door, when the thief is already rummaging through your things, than about the first one.. That is, we are not talking about the intentions of your attackers, how your midfield is structured to prevent the opponent from escaping, but we are talking about something that should be the last option, the most desperate. When everything depends on the duel and not on the order, in a sport where the best are usually rewarded, andBarça considers itself the victim of an inferiority that is as painful as it is obvious.
