I am Tired! Flickball Made Me Euphoric - Now It's Killing Me!
Forgive me because this isn't much of a match report as it is a rant.
You know what, fair play.
Chelsea were the deserved winners of this tie. 3-0 doesn't even tell half their dominance.
It could have been five, six, seven. They had three disallowed goals in the opening half hour, such was how easily they exploited Barcelona's weaknesses.
Right from minute one, it was obvious that Chelsea had done their homework on Barcelona and knew exactly what buttons to push to take advantage of Barcelona's weaknesses.
It pains me to relive the dread I felt when, in the opening fifteen minutes, Barcelona kept giving the ball to Chelsea simply because they could not find ways through that choking Chelsea press. Barcelona has players capable of finding individual solutions in the build-up. Cubarsi is an excellent passer who is calm on the ball and can pick a mean throughpass or a lofted ball over the top. Balde is a one-man wrecking ball who can decide to dribble through entire teams if he so chooses. Joan Garcia can ping passes down the wing with the best midfielders.
But unfortunately, these individuals also need structure, structure that, unfortunately, Flick doesn't seem to have provided, and if he has, then it's not showing. Building from the back has been Barca's biggest problem under Flick, and it often gets exposed when facing intense man-to-man pressing structures.
And guess what Chelsea went with? Exactly - intense man-to-man pressing.
Losing 1 vs 1s, a Chelsea Expected
Aside from Ferran's shot in the 12th minute, Barcelona hardly threatened Chelsea in that first half. Not for a lack of trying, oh no. They tried, they just couldn't consistently find solutions against a fired-up Chelsea that went 1 vs 1 all out across the pitch, trusting themselves to win those 1v1 duels - and they did. Even Lamine Yamal had no answers to Cucurella's gruelling questions.
Right now, when you go to any Barcelona forum, the talk is all on individual players - and rightfully so. Who knows how the game would have turned out if Ferran, a perfectly capable squad player but extremely limited as a starter, had scored Barca's best chance (that chance was worth 0.65 xG BTW. Just for comparison, a penalty has an xG of 0.79, so yeah, it was that great of a chance). Or who knows what would have happened if Kounde and Ferran hadn't gotten mixed up on the goal line for Chelsea's opening goal.
And oh my God, who knows what would have happened if Ronald Araujo had not argued with the referee for that stupid first yellow card that then doomed him when he made that late tackle on Cucurella later in the first half. Many will say that he shouldn't have done that, and indeed, knowing he was on a yellow, he shouldn't have done that. But it is a defender's tackle, so *shrugs*. To me, the tackle itself is not that big of a deal. It is the fact that his first yellow was so unnecessary that it made a typical defender's tackle-and-miss-the-ball worse in comparison.
Yes, we can talk about these individual errors, but when looking at the bigger picture, Flickball is coming up short this season against the very big games. For 30 minutes against PSG, Barcelona went toe-to-toe with the European Champions. After that, though, PSG made some minor adjustments and dominated that second half. Flick had no answers. Against Real Madrid, Barcelona got it all wrong and lost to a team that didn't even play that well.
Against Brugge, the plucky underdogs took advantage of the same weaknesses in Flick's system in that first half. Flick made some minor tweaks for the second half that saw Barcelona dominate Brugge, but Barca went on to draw that game after conceding a typically Flickball goal - crossfield ball behind Balde, onrushing attacker, goal, proving that small tweaks don't address the glaring weaknesses, unfortunately.
Flickball is a Straight Line - Predictable and One Dimensional
The point is, we are now seeing in real time, the negative sides of Flickball slowly and steadily begin to take over the good of Flickball. Flickball is founded on attacking space quickly and with as few passes as possible, all while trying to squeeze the pitch to stop the opponent from playing through the large gaps between players (Purist did an excellent video about the topic here). When it's great, oh my God, it's orgasmic, like an earbud gently wriggling in your ear or caresses from your beloved. That is what we saw for the majority of the season - dopamine injected straight to our veins and giving us a high we had not witnessed in Catalonia since a certain diminutive Argentine genius left for the sparkling Miami sands.
Yet, when Flickball is bad, oh my God, is it dreadful. It is an eyesore, like rotting flesh, or Messi in a PSG jersey. The gaps between players suddenly become entire chasms, the high line suddenly looks like a highway, and a red carpet is laid out for the opponents' attackers.
And don't get me started on how weak Barcelona players are in 1 v 1 duels. Aside from Ronald Araujo, who unfortunately dropped his brains and confidence sometime in 2023, who else in this Barcelona team can you trust to win a physical 1 vs 1 duel?
Lamine Yamal wins his 1 v 1s with his high technical skill, but even he comes up short whenever he encounters a defender strong enough to stand his ground and nudge him off the ball, or when he is double or even triple-teamed. Pedri uses his intelligence and peerless close control to keep the ball, but even he would struggle if he had to do that against three or four players. And my God, did Chelsea pack that midfield like sardines in a can. At some points in the game, Reece James, a right back playing in midfield, was playing almost as a ten, marking Eric Garcia during Barcelona build-ups.
Chelsea knew Barcelona would be light in midfield, and they set up in ways to dominate the center and isolate Barca players in 1 v 1s, trusting themselves to win the physical battles, and they absolutely did it to perfection. They won the duels, yes, but were also quicker and sharper to the second balls and looked to quickly hit those diagonals to Barca's isolated full backs for, you guessed it - 1 vs 1s.
Honestly, I don't think that we will see much change from Flick, who still believes his system is perfect and that it only needs 'more aggression' and 'better timing', even though those are not its biggest flaws. But my hope is that Laporta and Deco are watching this and planning on Barca's next players and manager because Flick and some of the players seem to have hit their ceiling. These higher-ups also deserve a significant share of the blame for the current underperformance because they left Flick with a depleted squad full of second-grade talents who overperformed last season.
Sure, the club has no money, but that is no excuse to leave the coach with a line-up of has-beens, like Araujo, never-will-bes like Ferran, and La Masia fifteen-year-olds who need more time to develop.
Now, it is dishonest to call a team that won the La Liga title last season bad, and it's not like these players became terrible overnight, but my word, in many ways, Barcelona lacks differential talents that can go toe to toe with the best in the world, and that includes in the coaching department.
Currently, Barcelona does not have the cumulative talent to compete consistently at the highest level and deliver results consistently, but they do have enough talent to not go out as limply as they did to Chelsea. And for that, even as we rightfully blame the players, ultimately, Flick's system is proving to be very easy for any manager to just tear through it because it is so one-dimensional that even a straight line shakes its head in disbelief.
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