Barca always does good as long as the other team doesn't study videos of Barca's recent defeats games, then developing a specific antidote strategy plus training hard using that strategy. If it had worked so well before it should most likely work again. What did Real Sociedad (RS) do? I saw their players immensely motivated, applying energy and anticipation galore in every single play because it's not that hard to see how uncomfortable Barca's players get when the opponent's players get that intense. They cannot deal with that and they lose every divided ball and miss more than half of the passes because they naively think that "the guy won't get there in time"..wrooong, because he does, so yet another broken play. Enter Atletico. I could see their players always getting to the ball before the Barca player, also always getting all the headers from high passes, immaterial of which side made the pass. Multiply that x2 inside the penalty area. Their legs always sticking out before the Barca player's leg gets there, in short, beating the Barca slow po's to the punch every single time. In fact, even on individual dribble, particularly during the first half, they dribbled past our players like if they were playing against the "3a Infantil", which is something that none of our players could do the whole game, particularly the super stars that are supposed to be the most skillful players on earth (Messi, Ney and Suarez) they couldn't dribble past their own shadow with the occasional exception of Don Andres.
If I was the coach I would've develop a program where everybody (and especially the front three) would sit down and look at the RS game video for hours and days if necessary, stop the video as often as necessary and discuss why is this not happening here and how would you... and you... and you, Sr. approach the play so it penetrates better. Questioning why didn't that work? Don't you have natural skills to do better than that? Why didn't you pass there, what are you a retard?. --- Beat them to death with the video and discussions and suggestions (plus hire some football expert outsider(s) to watch with them and suggest solutions and then everybody on to the field to now put ideas into practice against a group of players that have been trained to do exactly what RS was doing or to simply just park the bus and see how we can apply everybody's suggested alternative plays to resolve our moist gun-powder.
And, since Atletico's players were doing exactly what RS did, meaning being far quicker than Barca's, always anticipating and beating them to the punch over and over...have we seen this movie before? Aaah, but this time we were prepared for this because, from so many football brains that were forced to work on this both, mentally and physically, we have developed a few odd and unusual tricks to resolve the losing of divided balls and the lack of scoring and this will give us at least a goal or two and, perhaps, early in the game disappoint those motivated Atletico players enough with something they never expected, plus the fact that's too late for El Cholo to figure out what to do about.
Did Luis Enrique even think that the horrendous inefficiency of our attack in Anoeta was something that needs to be resolved by doing something about it instead of so stupidly saying "but we're still out in front by three and four points and this happens to all teams". What a friggin' retard. Loss to Madrid, loss to RS, along with several previous "squeak-by's", plus the Atletico first leg, although a win, did not show very different from the defeats and he still believed that we don't have a problem. A coach should be like a CEO, as in "the buck stops here" and by himself develop and bring up a solution before they kick our ass at the Champions. -- Are we so sure that we're going to win all of the remaining Liga games with no exceptions? I doubt it. Right now, the way things are, La Liga is anybody's of the top three.
