A backdrop of political turmoil and other talking points as Barcelona take on Athletic Bilbao

HIGH EMOTIONS IN VALVERDE HOMECOMING?

Barcelona boss Ernesto Valverde has admitted that the game will be “very special” on a personal level as he returns to face an Athletic Bilbao club that he managed with great success for four seasons before heading to the Nou Camp this summer.

Valverde is sure to receive a warm welcome from appreciative home fans before the game gets underway, but when the action starts it will be fascinating to see the tactical approach taken by Valverde’s replacement on the Basque club’s bench, Jose Angel Ziganda.

Barca faced some real battles against Athletic while they were managed by Valverde, who always sent out his players to face the Catalan club with a relentlessly physical and intense version of extreme pressing, refusing to give Barca’s players any time to settle on the ball and establish easy possession.

Although those tactics sometimes worked well they also regularly backfired, with Barca managing to pass their way around the pressure and taking ruthless advantage of the spaces left behind. And now, in their first trip to Bilbao in the home team’s post-Valverde era, they really won’t know what to expect: more of the same, or a different kind of opponent?

CAN LUIS SUAREZ REDISCOVER HIS MOJO?

Although Barca have made a generally very positive start to the season, sitting top of La Liga with eight wins and a draw from their first nine games, one very worrying aspect has been the form of Luis Suarez.

The Uruguayan striker has managed just three goals in his 11 outings for Barca in all competitions this season, and one horrendous miss in last weekend’s victory over Malaga – side-footing wide from about six yards when it seemed easier to score – prompted a reaction of alarm that, rapidly approaching his 31st birthday, Suarez has ‘lost it’.

Although his downturn in form has been undoubtedly concerning, it’s surely too early to write off Suarez completely as he adapts to the team’s new playing style following the summer departure of Neymar. With fellow forward Lionel Messi regularly dropping deep into midfield to pick up possession, Suarez is often unavoidably finding himself isolated, and also expected to do a lot more hard running down the left flank.

The new system does not particularly playing to Suarez’s strengths, it’s true, and he will be hard pushed to rediscover the goal-per-game productivity of the last three years.

But he remains an undisputed starter for Valverde – partly because there’s nobody else to pick – and will surely return to form before long.

POLITICAL FOOTBALL?

The game comes at a dramatic and extremely tense moment in Spanish history after the region of Catalonia, which has Barcelona as its capital, declared independence from Spain in a heavily contested vote in the regional parliament yesterday.

It’s fitting that Barca’s game since the declaration of independence – which the Spanish central government refuses to recognise – should come against Athletic, who have also long been regarded as effectively the national team for another potential breakaway region, the Basque Country.

Of course, all of this may well mean absolutely nothing when two groups of professional athletes meet to contest a game of football. They are sportsmen, not politicians, and San Mames will probably be an arena for everyone attending to forget about political issues, not to express them.

But the backdrop of the political turmoil within the country is undoubtedly dominating the build-up to the game, and the possibility of the encounter being marked by some kind of dramatic symbolic gesture – either in favour of independence or Spanish unionism – cannot be discounted.