Okay, so let me start by saying: yes, we were bad, we were really bad, disastrous even in the second half, but people are still exaggerating. When I read things like "we're aiming for the CL spots now" or "we can't win anything untl 2016" I have to laugh. This team is still one of the top 3 teams in the world, just not better than the other ones. Sometimes we lose, sometimes we win, and since we're not dominant anymore a lot depends on form and luck, and if we'd scored the 2-0 we would've won.
But to return to the bad things, what is most striking about this team is that it looks exactly like Tito's and Tata's Barça against the big teams. I can't believe how 3 managers in a row can't figure out to fix our tactical issues; I could understand if it was just because of poor individual performances but it goes beyond that. There's literally no movement whatsoever from our players, even when we were 3-1 down we never looked dangerous, and our team is incredibly slow on the attack. Mostly the opposition players can just walk back and still have 11 players behind the ball before we do anything.
Not even touching on the individual performances, we've known some players' deficiencies for quite some time now. We've always known Mascherano is small for a CB, we've always known Alves follows up a great performance by a terrible one (even during a game as we saw) and never tracks back, and we've always known Piqué is prone to stupid errors, so we shouldn't be surprised about that.
I have always supported Lucho up until now because he looks like a coach who knows what he wants and what he's doing, but I'm slowly losing confidence. I hope he sees what we did wrong today and finally changes things. Just like last year there was talk of us regaining our pressing, and it has gone again. Really weird that we're playing the same way for the third year in a row, with the exactly same, obvious deficiencies, and no one seems to know how to change it.
