I feel deceived. I feel like I’ve been lied to. Shame on you, Luis Enrique. Shame on you, Barcelona. Your defense was a lie, smoke and mirrors designed to deceive me into believing that your uninspiring signings and new head coach had done enough to get your defensive house in order.
Barcelona’s defense isn’t good enough to win anything
A run of seven straight clean sheets ended on Tuesday as Barcelona’s defense was exposed by PSG’s speedy attack.
Liars. Phonies. Rapscallions.
Paris Saint-Germain went through Barca's defense like a hot knife through butter in Tuesday's 3-2 win, using a combination of speed and efficient passing. It was exactly what we witnessed all of last season and most of the season before. Jéremy Mathieu isn't the answer. Javier Mascherano is one of the best defensive midfielders in the world, but simply not good enough as a center back. Your fullbacks? Ha, don't make me laugh. I don't care if fullbacks are actually attacking players in modern football; they still have to contribute something defensively, right?
Maybe I’m being too harsh. After all, it’s just one bad game after seven straight without a single goal conceded. Maybe I’m making a knee-jerk reaction to 90 minutes of football, but who has Barca really played this season before Tuesday’s loss against Paris Saint-Germain?
Elche, Villarreal, Athletic Bilbao, APEOL Nicosia, Levante, Málaga and Granada. Seven teams that have combined for 12 wins, 13 draws and 19 losses with a total of 34 goals scored. Take away APOEL's five wins in the Cyprus top flight and the eight goals they've scored in that competition, and the numbers look even worse.
Entering Tuesday’s match in Paris, Laurent Blanc’s team had scored 15 goals by themselves.
While it's a relatively small sample size considering how much football is left to be played this season, there is still a lesson to take away from Barcelona's loss: The defense is simply not good enough.
It's probably going to be good enough to get them out of Group F, and it'll probably be enough to get them past a vast majority of their La Liga opponents, but will it be enough for them to stay ahead of Real Madrid or Atlético Madrid? Will it be enough to get past whomever they run up against in the Round of 16? Highly doubtful.
There's still no true replacement for Carles Puyol, and Gerard Piqué is no longer a first-choice center back, at least not in Luis Enrique's eyes. Mathieu is tall and serviceable, but hardly a guy you'd pick as a player to start for a potential Champions League winner. Mascherano is a defensive midfielder -- he's always been a defensive midfielder -- but this is also the club that refused to play Yaya Touré in an attacking midfield role, so should we really be surprised? Marc Bartra is fine, but people are still waiting for him to move from potential starter to regular starter.
Barca’s high-possession system worked well because they had a center back pairing they could absolutely trust to be in the right place and make the right decisions when things went wrong. Now, they have a patchwork back line of aging and unsuitable options.
This isn’t new information, of course. We all expected Barca’s back line to fall apart eventually. After seven straight clean sheets, maybe they’d started to pull the wool over eyes just a bit. Maybe I’d started to believe that Enrique had made enough changes to restore the Blaugrana to a place amongst the favorites to win the Champions League.
Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.
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