There always has to be a first time for everything. Even for Hansi Flick’s Barça. After celebrating goals wildly in the previous matches, they were left to zero for the first time in the campaign. He didn’t have any goals (validated) to celebrate. The drought coincided with the first match of the season in which Lamine Yamal could not participate. The youth player was sidelined at the last minute due to a bruise on his right ankle that he suffered in Belgrade and attended the game, with a serious gesture, from the Reale Arena box. Without the elf of its most creative footballer, Barça lost a lot and lost its second match in the championship (in the first in Pamplona Lamine Yamal started as a substitute).
With the pearl of Rocafonda absent, no one occupied its space either physically or technically. The team lacked depth, breadth and imbalance. Without his fantasy the game became more predictable and vulgar. “I’ve missed Lamine, it’s normal. “The whole team has missed him,” reasoned a sad-faced Hansi Flick.
Flick: “I told the referee that they did not make a good decision disallowing Lewandowski’s goal”
But all that could have been very different if the VAR had endorsed Lewandowski’s goal before the quarter-hour mark. Lo and behold, also for the first time in the campaign, the semi-automatic offside machine harmed Barcelona’s interests. The technological system decreed that the tip of Lewandowski’s boot was more advanced than that of the royalist defender Aguerd. It was a millimeter play. An action that the human eye certainly saw backwards. Del Cerro Grande, in the VAR, endorsed the machine’s decision amid the Barcelona protests. One wonders if the system didn’t confuse one person’s foot with the other’s.
On the pitch and on the sidelines, Flick moved around much more nervously than usual, which gave rise to unprecedented images of the Blaugrana coach. Namely frequent dialogue with the fourth official and vehement conversation at half-time with the referee, Cuadra Fernández, who can already be classified as a bad referee for Barcelona in the Flick era. Two defeats for Barça in the League and both with the Madrid native assigned to the Balearic school. In El Sadar they did not interpret as a foul an action against Pau Víctor that ended in a goal for Osasuna and in San Sebastián, a goal by Lewandowski on the sidelines, Barcelona understood that they were too permissive with Real’s melee. “I told the referee that it was a goal, that they did not make a good decision disallowing Lewandowski’s goal. But it was not the referee’s fault, but rather the one who told him.” Cuadra Fernández answered him, as could be seen on television, as follows. “If the VAR tells us that it is offside, why would we invent it?”
This cannot hide that the Barcelona team played the worst game of the campaign on an offensive level. “It hasn’t been our day. We have to accept it. We can’t make excuses. We have not created enough chances and we have made bad decisions,” Flick admitted. His team did not shoot once between the sticks. This explains a good part of the defeat. A semi-automatic defeat.
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