I agree more or less with the general consensus, yes it’s our first defeat, but there is no reason to raise the red flag yet, a team in the verge of implosion (PSG) is capable of wonders (the example of Sociedad vs Real talks for himself), the era of Pep is gone, it was an exception in the football world, don’t expect to see such domination again when every adversary was a mere sparring partner for training purpose.
PSG has delivered some great performance, a perfect one in every aspect, Defense, Pressing, counter, solidarity (Cavani defending in his own surface was a symbol), we must take the performance of the opposing side into consideration if we want to objectively evaluate our output.
Yes tactically Parisians exposed some of our loopholes, in Lucho’s configuration, the 3 forwards are very axial, they are very close, to optimize the combination game, the RB and LB are the sole responsible of the wings, the eccentric midfielders (Rakitic and Iniesta) play the cover role, in this animation, Iniesta have more responsibilities, he basically has a triple role, creator, defender and accelerator, which is way too much, the issue is when the midfield is not defending well (knowing also that the forwards are not systematically involved in the defensive withdrawal, their axial position don’t help), the opposition team can find a lot of spaces when the pressing is done well.
That said we are still in a reconstruction phase, if it was a direct elimination, this result would be satisfactory, hopefully Lucho will learn something from this game, so we can be perfectly ready for the El classic.
We have a good squad with a great margin and this is only the beginning of the season, it’s absolutely logical to have both positive and negative points, be patient people.
