There is nothing like a well-timed loss.
Right before the international break, FC Barcelona went to visit Real Sociedad, all pomped up after tonkings of Bayern Munich and Real Madrid, knocking four goals past each of them, an orgiastic exorcism that could only be more complete with dead demons and exultant clergy.
La Real wasn’t interested. At all. The ensuing 0-1 loss was interesting in the way that losses are more interesting than wins if folks are looking to learn something about what a team needs and how it functions. Finishing the match with zero goals and zero shots on goal might be rather eloquent in the “how a team functions” regard, but the third loss was just as much psychological as the previous two.
La pausa is one of those goofy phrases that like others (tika taka, anyone?), gets sillier with overuse. But it’s relevant here, just as it was in the other two losses this season, to Monaco and Osasuna.
Flick’s approach is dynamic, wanting to get at the opponent with running, pressing, passing and verticality. When an opponent decides to run at Flick’s team with running, pressing, passing and verticality, strange things happen. Rather than calming down, looking for openings to exploit, for the same reasons running, pressing, passing and verticality make Barça vulnerable, they turn the volume up to 12.
The result is head tennis in midfield, runners run amok, surprise goals that aren’t at all surprising given the state of the match, and — this season so far — losses.
Lamine Yamal was absent, and his presence was sorely missed. But Barça, being down to ten with Frenkie De Jong in the XI notwithstanding, had more than enough horsepower to beat La Real. So what happened?
Flickball got out Flickballed. La Real had faster, stronger, more aggressive players more willing to run themselves into the ground. And when signs that such a precise thing was occurring, four sets of fresh legs were subbed in, to allow them to keep running, pressing and making the match frenetic in an unmanageable way.
The lone goal was easy to explain, but it goes beyond Inaki Pena having all the distribution skills and nous of a drunken sailor at 3 a.m. on payday. His clearance was ridiculous, and directly to a La Real player. He was feeling pressure even when there wasn’t pressure, and wanted to just get the ball out of there.
When it pinged right back at them, then to their forward who had been firing warning shots across the Barça bow all match, Kounde needed to put a body on him. He didn’t. That meant Cubarsi had no chance to make a play, and Pena’s shot stopping skills, when a player has a passel of places to put a ball, are even weaker than they customarily are. And there was the goal that turned out to be the winning goal.
Nobody ever said, “What’s the hurry, Bub?” Crosses to Lewandowski were easily parried, La Real got a hustling, diving player in front of every potentially dangerous pass. The one time that anything good happened for Barça came when De Jong did the one thing the team needed someone, anyone to do: he made a run that tilted the La Real press, resulting in a goal that really wasn’t a goal because of the automated offside thingamabob.
That should have been fine, and shouldn’t have been enough to win, except that Barça is still psychologically vulnerable, not in the teeter-totter way of past teams, where the first bit of adversity turns them into a dark cloud of ineffectiveness. This team wants to outdo people, wants to press to get results. In chasing a match, it chases harder and thus becomes even more vulnerable to an opponent such as La Real who, for better finishing and decisions in the final third, would have had two or three more goals.
They ran Barça off the pitch because Barça made itself vulnerable in trying to run _them_ off the pitch. It was funny to watch in many ways because every weakness in Flick’s side was exacerbated. Balde looked like a fullback on a merry-go-round, with no idea what to do with Take Kubo in the same way opponents have no idea what to do with Lamine Yamal.
There isn’t a ball-carrying fullback to bypass that first line of the press, in the style of Pique or more ideally, Umtiti. So everybody has to do more work, finding that sliver of a passing lane before it’s jumped by an opponent, which makes the passes rushed, or depending upon the distribution of the keeper over distance, but in a maelstrom of a midfield, those long balls just fall to opponents, who go running the other way to press an out of balance Barça.
There aren’t wing runners, because wing runners need the ball to run onto, and the midfield is busy trying to get the ball, running for its life, or chasing breaks that it can’t catch.
Dani Olmo coming on provided a brief breath of fresh air before the panic returned, and the match rushed to its inevitable result.
Opponents are going to study that match to find what might be learned from it. And essentially, what is there to be learned? You can press the hell out of Barça, and if you’re lucky enough to capitalize on a mistake, you have to keep pressing, to run yourself into the ground.
But ah, why didn’t Bayern and Real Madrid do that same thing? Because they’re too good. The energy, commitment and selflessness it takes to play a match like La Real or Osasuna played isn’t in the CV of top clubs. Not these days. Their approaches are more conventional, which allows Flickball to Flick.
Barça also needs a left back who isn’t a mess, consistently leaving playing space for opponents because Barça doesn’t have the other thing it needs, which are mids who can run, stop breaks and defend. Pedri is a wonderful defender when he can be proactive, and the opponent isn’t running away from him as fast as he can. Then Pedri is just another slow dude chasing a ball he is never going to catch.
When a team is slow and an opponent is playing fast, it’s even more imperative to play with control and calmness. That didn’t happen.
“But they scored a goal, it just was incorrectly ruled offside.”
Then they didn’t score a goal. And that phantom goal doesn’t mean they weren’t run off the pitch by an opponent who had more energy, was faster, stronger and had a better match plan. Flick will, if he is half as good as we all think he is, sit the team down and say, “This is what happened, here’s how I think we should keep that from happening again.”
There will be ample opportunities for us to see if Flick’s team is capable of learning from its mistakes, because that La Real approach is going to become a blueprint for how to play FC Barcelona, with or without Lamine Yamal.