After watching this match, we’re mainly thinking one thing: this is going to be a long, hard season. Barca won’t be skipping past opponent after opponent, demolishing all those who cross our path, not this time around.A team we would have royally thrashed a year ago managed to calmly beat us last night, why is that? Because the boys were simply exhausted, and it showed. With so many exterior factors making the team suffer, Barca are probably worse off than any team in Europe this year:
The World Cup has stuck its arm out and given the season a good push, compressing all the matches into the shortest possible space of time to make way for itself. There’s not going to be a lot of time to prepare for the matches, and the players are going to be tired the way they were last night.
Of course, it’s like that for the rest of the clubs in Europe as well… but they didn’t win a treble last year. They didn’t have a preseason hampered by various Supercups, and they don’t have a Club World Cup coming up in December that will muddle everything up all over again.
Then there’s the fact almost every single one of our players, excepting maybe three or four, get called away to join their country squads when internationals hit. Then they come back exhausted or injured or both, with another match to play in a couple of days. That’s a couple of days to get back, recharge, shed the national skin and slip back into club-mode. Yeah, that’s never a huge success.
And when you’re Barca and you’re coming out of a mind-blowing treble triumph, everyone’s expecting the world from you. The pressure is gonna be on all season long, just like it was last night. Not only were they pressured, the boys were also dead tired, they didn’t have enough time to prepare for this, and several are out with injury or barely recovered. Oh, and add Dani Alves to that list: our only right-back is now out for around three weeks, just wonderful!
And given the circumstances, we think the boys did pretty well. Passing was great and we held fantastic possession, our counter attack was fast and we were creating chances. Just, it didn’t get too far past creating, because, like on the Mestalla, the buildup to the chances was slow and execution was poor; there was really not much threat on goal from us.
Victor Valdes and the entire team were caught off guard from the start, letting the opposition open up the scoring from the second minute. The rest of the first half passed by with a few un-dangerous attempts at scoring on our part, before Ibrahimovic finally found the net in the first minutes of the second half. The goal was spectacular and Xavi’s pass to him couldn’t have been more perfect; and can we stop to mention how uniquely alert and alive Ibra was last night? He played a pretty good match despite the tacky result, and things really seemed to pick up bit after he scored; he had us hopeful again, feeling like the second goal would come at any minute…
And oh, it did, but for Kazan, not Barca. And that was the crushing blow, as the match drew to an end with Barca desperately attacking to no avail.
Rubin Kazan are on top of the world, and we’re out of a match with no points for the first time this season. Inter Milan drew with Dynamo Kyiv, which pretty much puts all the teams in group F on common ground; the second leg will decide which two will go on to the last sixteen. We’re sure Barca can make it, but again: nothing’s going to be easy.
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