Saturday's match showed the pros and cons of the new system, designed to get the best out of Messi, Neymar and Suárez, more obviously than any other so far.
If I was being cruel – and for a second I will be – this would be how I represented Luis Enrique’s pre-match tactical plan at the moment:
1. Pick Munir and Pedro up front.
2. Play badly for an hour.
3. Bring on Neymar.
4. ???
5. Profit!
It’s obviously unfair to reduce Luis Enrique’s ideas to such a glib and ironic list, but the last two matches have followed that basic pattern. Of course, the specific details of those victories have been rather different and each has shown that the new manager’s ideas are beginning to work.
His side has been frustrated for long spells by high-quality opponents, Villarreal and Athletic Club, and although these sides have used different defensive plans and forced Barça to attack in different ways, both have been defeated and Barça deservedly have nine points from an available nine in La Liga.
Barça continued with the fluid 4-3-3/4-3-1-2/3-4-1-2 we are becoming used to seeing. While in the last game Villarreal sat very deep and suckered Dani Alves into aimlessly crossing all match, Athletic Club held a resolutely high line in a 4-2-3-1 and squeezed Barça’s midfield hard. The fact that both sides were playing with very high lines meant that they spent most of the match trying long balls over the top or trying to create quick combinations to access the space behind the defences.
When there were no forward passes on, which was very often, Barça played cross-field switches to the opposite flank, where Ivan Rakitić and Andrés Iniesta were frequently stationing themselves.
By half-time Jérémy Mathieu and Javier Mascherano had tried 8 long passes each, completing 6 and 5 respectively, while Rakitić had completed 5 of 7. The team had racked up 37 attempted long passes in one half, compared to the 42 they tried in the entirety of the last home game against Elche. Barça finished the match with 67 long passes attempted in total, way above their average.
It was a smart and typically ambitious defensive strategy from Ernesto Valverde’s men, who refused to park the bus and play for a 0-0, though it hardly made for an edifying spectacle. There were some moments in this game where both sides were so narrow, compact and focused on winning the ball that that one could have been forgiven for thinking they were watching an English lower league game.
The biggest visible change in Barça’s style was not how they attacked – high-tempo vertical breaks have been preferred over patient tiki-taka in most games – but how they defended. When Athletic had the ball, Barça’s defence dropped relatively deep and the attackers rarely pressured Athletic’s centre-backs when they were in possession.
Whereas previous Barça games this season have featured relatively hard pressing, in this one there was almost none whatsoever. In the match versus Villarreal, for example, Barça’s starting front three made more tackles than their starting back four. Against Athletic, they made one tackle and zero interceptions between them.
This lack of pressure on the ball meant they often appeared unstructured when Athletic came forward, but in reality Barça were simply drawing the opposition out and creating space. They closed into formation when ball entered their half before looking to win the ball back and break quickly with the pace of Lionel Messi and the two ahead of him.
This was how they eventually scored both goals, with Sergio Busquets intercepting and playing to Messi, who provided two very different but equally impressive assists to Neymar. Each move lasted just a few seconds but covered half the length of the pitch and provided the Brazilian with chances he was very likely to convert. Messi created four other chances from similar situations.
In the later stages when the game was there to be won, Barça’s attackers did apply more pressure to the ball but the defensive line continued to drop off behind as it had been during earlier, more passive passages of play. It was strange to see such a broken-team strategy used by Barça, particularly as we have come to associate them with being the ultimate collective unit.
In possession, the big problem once again was the starting front three’s somewhat static positioning. It was not only an issue when it came to building attacks, but also when Barça chose to keep and circulate the ball. Occasionally one pulled wide to give a teammate a passing option, but this meant that the Athletic defence could push even higher and not worry so much about the balls in behind that were obviously Barça’s Plan A.
Consequently, Barça’s midfield often had possession of the ball but no promising forward passing options and several Athletic players them closing down and forcing them to go backwards. The first half was notable for the lack of touches that the front three had for this reason.
While it is hardly fair to compare this or any other team to Pep Guardiola’s Barça at their peak, the contrast between the behaviour of Luis Enrique’s forwards and Guardiola’s could hardly be starker. Pep’s forwards, be they Lionel Messi, Thierry Henry, Samuel Eto’o, Pedro, Bojan or David Villa, almost always started wide and ran in behind the defence, which caused a lot more problems than this system does on the whole.
There were moments on the counter where Barça needed to use the width of the pitch like Guardiola’s team did to create gaps in Athletic’s defence. On a few occasions their fast breaks were ruined by the poor positioning of attacking players and the non-existent overlaps or runs from midfield, which created situations that were easy to read for the opposition, such as this one below, when Messi only had one pass on despite Athletic’s six defenders all being very close together. The pass was intercepted and the move ended there.
In fairness to Luis Enrique, this narrow, counterattacking strategy is in its infancy and it did create the majority of the team’s chances despite these problems. There were three very presentable chances for Munir that would have changed the game had they been converted, but the youngster fired two straight at Gorka Iraizoz and was wrongly given offside when he tucked the other into the back of the net. Messi also had a couple of chances to score that were created on the break but was denied by some heroic covering defending.
To conclude, this was another hard-fought match in which Barça were comfortably superior and deserved their win. Tactically, it was perhaps the most illustrative match of Luis Enrique’s tenure to date. When we look at the features of this game – Messi leading fast breaks, a static front two relatively unburdened by defensive duties, dynamic central midfielders receiving the ball in wide zones – it is clear to see where Lucho and his staff see this team going. Things will only get better when Neymar and Luis Suárez come in to the starting eleven.
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