The key
1- Pressure is the door that leads to success.
Xavi doesn’t have vertigo. Neither his Barça. It is a team that loves to live away from Ter Stegen. The farther the better! This is the only way to understand the fierce, almost fanatical pressure that they develop when they don’t have the ball. It then becomes a hungry Barça, strangely hungry. He ran as if his life depended on a piece of bread. And the crust was the ball. No more no less.
This is how it came to 0-1, the product of a defensive fierceness by Koundé, who took the ball from Álex Baena. From that moment on, a modern, electric, dizzying Barça was activated, capable of manufacturing a play full of precision in just seven seconds. From Gavi to Pedri passing the leather, beautifully pampered previously by Frenkie de Jong, Raphinha and Lewandowski in a goal that synthesizes the most symbolic face of Xavi’s Barça. Press, therefore it exists. Press, then dial.
The problem
2.- Lewandowski shoots, but doesn’t aim well.
It is not the same. Not much less. He is not the same accurate ‘nine’, lucid in the area where the goal was so immense that no one was capable of frustrating him. His statistics are still very valuable for Xavi’s Barça. But he has lost the lucidity that he used to, that which had made him an irreproachable striker. As soon as the game began, Pedri invented a monumental assist to leave the Polish striker alone against Reina. Only because Albiol, at 37, didn’t have his legs to stop him, so ‘Lewi’ had space and time to adjust his coordinates. In Lewandowski’s GPS at the start of the season there would be no doubt. It was goal or goal.
In the current GPS, he finished his shot into the body of Reina, who cunningly waited to position himself in the center of the path of the play. The former Bayern player ran into the veteran Villarreal goalkeeper. At the age of 40, Reina won that first decisive play against Barça’s ‘nine’. It would not be the last. Not even half an hour into the game when the ‘groguet’ goalkeeper threw his body to the ground to clear another poisonous shot from the Pole. Something strange happens to him. Two shots on goal, two saves from Reina. And two moments in which Lewandowski did not seem like Lewandowski, no matter how much he assisted Pedri in the 0-1 between the two actions. And the third shot from him was also repelled by Reina.
the tactic
3.- Villarreal, without ‘nine’.
Lewandowski was hanging from the Villarreal area to intervene in the game as if he were inside, right winger or sometimes even up to a center midfielder. Barça played with him. Setién, on the other hand, did not have a specialist in that position due to Gerard Moreno’s injury. The Villarreal star was dragged by muscular discomfort, which left the Cantabrian coach without his main reference, thus forcing him to invent a much more dynamic attack with Morales transformed into a false nine, subjected to the physical stress of measuring himself against beasts like Araujo and Koundé.
Coquelin’s injury caused a change in the system since Setién placed Chukwueze on the right wing, embedding Morales now definitively as a center forward, while Yeremy Pino occupied the left flank. But Villarreal did not generate danger, at least in the first half. Until in added time Pedri’s mistake, a disastrous loan back, left Morales alone against Ter Stegen. But he shot wrong. The 4-3-3 in the second half ordered by Setién caused Barça to run out of the ball. Although he had spaces that he did not know how to take advantage of.
The marking
4.- Araujo, a master in defense.
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He completed a lavish match. He understood each split ball as something more than a matter of honor. And he was. Araujo taught an incredible lesson in defensive commitment, leaving scenes that moved even his own teammates, especially Ter Stegen, who has his guardian angel in the Uruguayan. Up to five, yes five spectacular defensive actions’ signed Araujo.
And the five, in addition, to the same Villarreal striker. Five to Yeremy Pino, whom he led down the path of perdition because he never erred. The center never failed. In each cut, Ter Stegen gave him an ovation. At each cut, Xavi felt relieved. In each cut, and remember that there were five!, Barça snorted. And already in added time, Araujo avoided Mojica’s dangerous cross to seal a lavish match.