With his face twitching, his eyes on the ground and his concern clearly evident. Barça is not starting and its coach, Xavi Hernández, is looking for solutions without finding them. That’s why he says enough. That’s why he’s had enough of good words and pats on the back. That is why he has raised his tone and demands that his men wake up now. “We have to change our mentality if we want to win titles,” said Xavi. Each game is an agony, a lifelessness, a prayer to try to score even a point. Each match is a short-circuited cloud of legs, inaccuracies, and lack of continuity. Each function ends with a bittersweet taste. That’s why the coach called for rebuttal.
“In the second half we were more aggressive, but we woke up when it was too late. We have to demand much more of ourselves. Leagues are won and lost on these fields. We have to be more self-critical. We lack continuity. We have to wake up. We have to improve a lot. We have to give more. It is evidence. We have to do the second half in the first and look for the game from the first minute.”
Only two victories in the last five games turn Barcelona’s moment into a slump just as they began a marathon of games until Christmas against Rayo. But when you only score five goals in this series of matches everything becomes more difficult. Against Madrid the team collapsed at the end, in Hamburg it was an absolute disaster and in Vallecas they had to wait for an own goal to avoid leaving empty-handed. “I think we deserved more, we created opportunities to win, but it wasn’t enough,” Xavi analyzed.
Barça fights, tries, insists, but it is not superior to almost anyone. In up to six games that he has trailed in the League, he has managed not to lose, to sign three victories (Villarreal, Celta, Alavés) and three draws (Granada, Mallorca, Rayo), but this also means that he has had to row against the current too many times. matches and against medium-low level opponents.
“We gave away goals, in Vallecas it happened to us again, and we always have to come back and it is very difficult, especially in the opposite field. Things change a lot in modern football if you advance. We have to move away from what we did in the first half and get closer to what we did in the second,” the coach acknowledged.
Xavi tried it with the return of De Jong first, with the departure of Gündogan or João Félix later. With a starting square. With a rhombus later. In desperation at the end. But there is no way to become more solvent. To make matters worse, no luck. A goal from the rival that could have been disallowed and a post by Raphinha, which was subject to a possible penalty. “We are not having luck with referee decisions that require interpretation. We’ve been getting tails since the beginning of the season. Let’s see if we have more luck because the penalty against Raphinha was clear,” said Xavi. “But they are not excuses, let it be clear,” remarked the one from Terrassa. The coach only had good words for Iñaki Peña (“he has been solvent”) and for Frenkie de Jong (“he gives us a lot”). The coach needs more, much more from his team.
