Champions League: The loss that no one saw coming but Barcelona only have themselves to blame

Andy West 01:34 11/04/2018
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  • Barcelona players try to come to terms with the loss

    It would be easy to say with the benefit of hindsight that everyone knew Barcelona were in a vulnerable position and that their shocking capitulation at Roma was on the cards.

    But to be truthful, absolutely nobody saw this coming and the Catalan club are in a state of shock as they attempt to digest exactly what went wrong in the Italian capital.

    Perhaps there was an element of complacency following the 4-1 victory in last week’s first leg, which appeared to have sewn up the tie and made the return match a formality.

    Manager Ernesto Valverde was extremely anxious to guard against taking anything for granted, repeatedly stating in increasingly vexed tones during Monday’s pre-match press conference that his team still faced a tough task to get the result they needed for a semi-final berth.

    We can be sure that Valverde also repeated those messages of caution in the dressing room, but there is a possibility they went into one ear of his players and straight out of the other.

    “We are Barcelona and we’ve got a 4-1 lead against Roma from the first leg,” they may have been thinking. “Of course we’re going through.”

    But that can only be a small part of the answer, if indeed it is relevant at all, because any feelings of casual entitlement among the visiting players will have quickly disappeared when Roma raced into an early lead.

    From that moment onwards, it was abundantly clear that Barca had a fight on their hands, and if they had entered the game with a sense of complacency they certainly can’t have felt that way after the reborn Edin Dzeko fired home the opener.

    Even the shock of that early goal, however, could not do anything to lift the visiting team and they continued to play as though they were in a trance. They were second to every loose ball, sloppily inaccurate in their distribution, slow to close down Roma’s runners and feeble in the challenge.

    Simply outplayed, all over the pitch.

    Although the inability of Lionel Messi – who sent two free-kicks well off target – to lift his team will inevitably dominate much of the post-match discussion, in truth the biggest shock was just how vulnerable Barca looked defensively throughout the game.

    The biggest improvement effected by Valverde has been to tighten up his team defensively – not just in terms of the back four, but also the overall structure of the team to prevent the opposition from generating significant threat.

    The team’s stats of just 16 goals conceded in 31 league games (less than half the total allowed by Real Madrid, for comparison’s sake) speaks for itself.

    Barca have been extremely good defensively this season, but there was absolutely no sign of that solidity on this occasion as Roma followed a fairly straightforward game-plan – get the ball wide and deliver deep crosses to expose the lack of height of full-backs Nelson Semedo and Jordi Alba – and the visitors simply had no answers.

    A batch of outstanding saves from Marc-Andre ter Stegen was the only reason Barca stayed ahead in the tie for so long, but even the German keeper was culpable for the first goal as he stayed rooted to his line, allowing Dzeko to score.

    The second goal came through some calamitous defending from Gerard Pique, who has been top class this season but, like fellow central defender Samuel Umtiti, looked dreadfully uncomfortable all night.

    So there were individual errors and a lack of collective coherence, and the players must carry a great deal of responsibility for playing so poorly.

    But there will also undoubtedly be severe criticism for Valverde, who has earned a lot of praise so far this season but will now experience the other side of the coin.

    The coach will face particular stick for his failure to do anything to change the game, not making any substitutions until the final ten minutes even though his team was performing terribly all night.

    Leaving Ousmane Dembele on the bench until the 85th minute was an especially timid move, and Valverde’s failure to act could now even throw his future at the club into doubt.

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