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The reigning champions of Spain have definitely seen some better days as of late.
We are slowly but surely getting closer to matchday six and after five games played in the 2019/20 La Liga season, Barcelona comfortably sit in… Eighth position on the table.
If you had to double-check that, that’s completely justified because Blaugrana only winning seven points from the 15 that were up for grabs is not really a sight that you can see that often.
In fact, seeing Barcelona anywhere but in the top two or top three at the very least is very much a novelty in the modern days of football. But on the other hand, it is still early days and the league table is bound to balance itself out come the latter stages of the competition.
Still, this hardly takes anything away from the Catalans’ (under)achievements so far in the domestic competition.
And their troubles and issues certainly run deep because when you are sitting in eighth with a 1.06bn-rated squad, something is definitely amiss.
Their latest bout against Granada away from home on matchday five ended in a surprising 2-0 defeat to a newly promoted side that was still in Segunda when Blaugrana were claiming their La Liga title in the 2018/19 season.
And one big part of that defeat, among others, was Ernesto Valverde’s weird choice of personnel that seemed to arrive out of the blue and not really following a clear tactical plan.
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Just prior to that game, Barcelona were hosted by Borussia Dortmund at Signal Iduna Park in a mid-week Champions League opener and ended up tallying a goalless draw to start their campaign.
That game, and the one before that, saw the introduction of a really dynamic midfield comprising of Sergio Busquets, Frenkie de Jong and Arthur Melo. Even though the results were quite mixed, obviously, that part of the pitch seemed to work rather well throughout all the games.
And then Valverde decided to mix it all up, deploying Ivan Rakitic and Sergi Roberto next to De Jong instead of the aforementioned duo and he kept an underperforming Luis Suarez in the squad to the detriment of the whole team.
We can’t really say for certain why exactly he decided to tamper with something that seemed to work. Was it maybe underestimating Granada and feeling a weaker Barcelona squad could still get the job done against a newly promoted team? Did he feel that Rakitic and Roberto deserved their starts over the former midfield trident? Both answers could be true but either way, he made a big mistake in his lineup selection and he did in multiple positions across the pitch.
He changed the midfield, left Suarez in the squad, dropped Antoine Griezmann to the left and then had to resort to still not match-sharp Lionel Messi and a 16-year-old kid saving the day. Not really ideal by any stretch of the imagination.
So if he had to take away a single thing from the Granada game and apply it to the clash against Villarreal on Tuesday evening, it should definitely be getting his starting XI right.
That means playing players that have warranted a spot in the gala squad and benching players who didn’t. It’s difficult to say that he’s been guilty of playing stars only based on their names and reputation alone, since there’s no real proof of that there, but the Suarez example mentioned above is definitely a real contender for that.
Still, the exclusion of Rakitic from the latest squad list might be a sign Valverde is actually learning how to choose his players properly but the biggest proof will have to come once the official lineups are out tomorrow before the game.
If he wants his team to get better and improve, he will have to start getting the basics, like the lineup, right.
It all starts with Villarreal. Is Valverde finally going to make the right move or is the team going to continue their descent down the table?
We’ll see tomorrow night.