The Barça coach acknowledged that he was “uncomfortable” after the games against Espanyol and Intercity and lamented the “lack of strength”
Xavi Hernández is concerned about the situation his team is in since the league returned after the World Cup in Qatar. The Barça coach has seen in just four days how his team failed to progress beyond the home draw against Espanyol and, most disturbingly, how Intercity came up to their beards in the Copa del Rey in a match where the azulgranas lost control of the round of 32 clash, a draw in which Barcelona debuted in the KO tournament on Wednesday and they had to resolve in extra time.
“This lack of power makes me feel uncomfortable, especially in attack. It can happen on defense, but not on offense, and it’s happened in both areas. We have to close the matches much earlier. We made life difficult for ourselves,” Xavi acknowledged after Barcelona’s match against Intercity at the Rico Pérez in Alicante. he suffered immensely against an opponent who disturbed Iñaki Peña only six times, three of them in goal.
Xavi’s frustration comes after a cup match in which it was a priori no time to suffer. The Catalan coach put an eleven into battle with starting theorists and theirs were clearly superior, but they didn’t finish the job and little by little Intercity grew to the mercy of a Barca that broke down in the second half. That lack of solidity in defense is the other circumstance that has worried Xavi in the last two games.
Barca forged its league leadership before moving on to Qatar, thanks in large part to its defensive prowess. Ter Stegen conceded just five goals in the first 14 league matches and the Catalans conceded four, almost the same number, in the last two games. Against Intercity, Barça stepped into the abyss in the cup and it did so because of an old evil that Xavi believed he had addressed. Aarón put the Catalans under control several times with transitional plays and every ball behind the central defenders was a torment for the Blaugrana defense. Soldevila’s hat-trick set up a defense in which Bellerín continued without showing signs of securing a spot in the starting line-up, while Koundé, Araujo, Eric García and Marcos Alonso showed a lack of strength and Jordi Alba shined more in attack than in defense work.
And without Lewandowski
To a skinny dog it’s all fleas and that’s what happens to Barcelona. The Administrative Court of Sport (TAD) on Wednesday upheld the three-game suspension for Robert Lewandowski and his teammates will have to improve in the opposite area without their greatest exponent. The Polish striker will not be in the difficult game against Atlético de Madrid in the Metropolitano on Sunday and will not be able to play the games against Getafe and Girona for the next two days. Without him, the culés lose a player who has participated in 17 of the 34 goals scored by the culé team and who is the reference on which all Barça’s offensive equipment revolves.
Barcelona president Joan Laporta on Thursday referred to the penalty imposed on Lewandowski, describing the sanction on his team’s big star as “very excessive” but “logical as the regulations are”. “We accept the resolution of the TAD. We’ve always done that. We have always accepted sports jurisdiction, but the TAD did not step into the background and we went to the ordinary courts to ask for a very precautionary measure. It was awarded to us (for Lewandowski to play Espanyol) until the TAD resolution was final. We thought that the TAD would rule sooner and then, that it would later, but it seems that since there was a party these days, they met before and they can’t play against Atlético,” launched the top Barça leader “Had the rules been less rigid, the sanction could have been only for one match, but as it is now, it’s within logic,” Laporta lamented of Cadena Ser.
Speaking of the Cup’s painful duel against Intercity, Laporta stressed that Barça’s players had “an attitude and the fight was commendable”. “I’m not mad about the game. I am happy because we succeeded. This Cup model is nice. It suffered at times, but it was clear that we would win in the end,” he said.
Laporta was also asked about the possibility of signing Portuguese midfielder Bernardo Silva, assuring that “Barcelona will not pay 80 million euros for him”, while faced with the dream of strengthening the team with Erling Haaland, he limited himself to comment: “We’ll see how he does at City.” “At the moment we have Lewandowski, who is doing very well,” he said.
“If the resolution of the Luxembourg Court is favorable, I think the Super League will be a fact in 2025,” Joan Laporta predicted this Thursday. The president of Barcelona predicts that the future major European tournament promoted by Florentino Pérez “will initially compete with the Premier, since the English teams do not participate at the beginning”, but he is convinced that “everything will end later in a merger between the Super League and Primera».
“The ruling of the Luxembourg Court – which will be made public this year – will be as important for the clubs as the Bosman law is for the players. I believe in an open Super League. The idea that it’s open isn’t that it’s mine, it’s that Barca wouldn’t be entering the Super League if it wasn’t open. Real Madrid and Juventus accepted it and so did the rest of the clubs, because the English are still there and we want them to be there. What we ask and what we want is for the clubs to rule, and I hope that UEFA is part of the board and has a chairman in the Super League meetings,” said Laporta. “The meritocracy of being in the Super League will come from the UEFA competitions and from the national competitions, in which I believe,” he added.
Regarding his relationship with Super League’s biggest opponent, Javier Tebas, the Barça president assured that “the staff has never been bad, although it has been tense.” «Thebes is a complicated person. They should be more concerned with getting football subscribers back on television, increasing the revenue of Spanish football,” claimed Laporta, who, after admitting that “Barça were in ruins and that’s why Messi could not be kept”, expressed optimism about the economic future of the culé entity: “The partners can rest easy. The treasury situation is under control. We are in a profit situation where we suffered losses before”, although we are alert. We feel that we are saving the club “, he said.
Source: La Verdad
I am Shawn Partain, a journalist and content creator working for the Today Times Live. I specialize in sports journalism, writing articles that cover major sporting events and news stories. With a passion for storytelling and an eye for detail, I strive to be accurate and insightful in my work.
