Barcelona in crisis! The end of an era! Luis Enrique out! The newspaper headlines, the cries on social media, the complaints of fans all pointed toward a sense of discontent in and around the blaugrana. Poor results and reported unrest behind the scenes only furthered the belief that something was seriously out of whack at the Camp Nou.
Reports of Barcelona’s impending demise were greatly exaggerated
Perhaps we were ready to write off the Blaugrana a bit too quickly.
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Then Sunday happened, and suddenly, the clouds parted above one of Spain’s great temples of football, and the glorious rays of inspiring light once again shone upon the Catalan giants.
Were we bamboozled by an overeager media perhaps a bit too ready to dine on Barca’s carcass? Definitely.
Was the firing of Andoni Zubizarreta, while an important move for the future of the club, perhaps not directly connected to the state of affairs on the pitch? Maybe -- well, probably so.
Maybe we just got suckered in by the wonderfully juicy storyline of one of the world’s biggest clubs falling to pieces before our very eyes.
In our haste to bury Barcelona's season, sell Lionel Messi to Chelsea, and condemn their future thanks to their one-year transfer ban, we forgot this is still an extremely talented team. Are they perfect? Far from it, but they're still very dangerous, and after they took apart a very good Atlético Madrid side Sunday, they've reminded everyone that they're still very much alive.
It helped, of course, that Sunday’s performance was not the type we’re used to seeing from Diego Simeone’s team. They were disorganized, they were defensively all over the place, and so it was really no surprise they were taken out of the game very early. Perhaps their Copa del Rey win over Real Madrid took something out of Atléti, and they failed to recover mentally for this important league match.
But Barcelona went into the match prepared to rattle the visitors. Luis Enrique pulled a massively simple, yet massively important bit of tactical magic against Simeone by switching Luis Suárez and Lionel Messi. By putting the Argentine out on the right wing, it allowed Suárez to play centrally -- which is where he should be -- and completely threw the Atléti defense for a loop. Atléti weren't prepared for a Barcelona side with Messi out wide, and they were completely unable to deal with it.
Raise your hand if you thought that Enrique would “out-tactic” Simeone?
PUT YOUR HAND DOWN. YOU’RE A LIAR.
Nobody saw that move coming, least of all Simeone and Atléti, despite the fact that in Messi’s early days, he regularly played out wide, allowing the likes of Samuel Eto’o or Zlatan Ibrahimović to operate centrally. The surprise element combined with the general performance from the Barcelona offense allowed them to completely turn the Atlético Madrid defense inside out.
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Even if Messi moves back to the middle in next week’s game at Elche, opponents will now have to prepare for the possibility that he might once again be played out wide. The tape of this match alone will give opposing managers tactical nightmares to deal with the rest of the season, and likely well into the future.
Of course, this was still just one game -- an important game, of course, but it’s not enough to swing the narrative 360 degrees; to begin crowning Barcelona La Liga champions and handing them European trophies. Another stutter in coming weeks, and we’re sure to once again see the words “Barcelona” and “crisis” sharing headlines.
But results like Sunday’s 3-1 win over Atléti remind us that Barcelona are still extremely dangerous -- and we’ve all been just a little bit guilty of being too ready, and a bit too willing, to write off a team that’s not ready to be written off.
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