Malaga - FC Barcelona | La Liga Matchday 2 | Aug 25, 2013

ADRIANO  ..and it begins

Is he injured again?

Right knock on his right thigh

What a shame, he was on course to take Alba's spot.

Valdes is a very lucky guy today.

So Adriano is injured again. I'd play Montoya more often.

On a side note, I think Alexis is much better than Pedro lately and should be starter with Messi (once he is fit) and Neymar.

What's the idea behind starting Xavi in three (likely four) straight games and hardly giving him any rest? How long can he sustain it?

We haven't really improved anything under Tata. Just slightly better pressing. Although it's not strange as the same players play regardless of merit. Well, let's see if we can improve, otherwise we won't do shit this seasons.

On a positive note, Neymar is clearly on form and he showed he can drible in Europe and will be an awesome player.

I believe we have one of the weakest defenses in laliga.   If only teams had the balls to attack us. Parking the bus and only relying on counters rarely ever works for laliga teams (unless you are one of the 2 madrids)

Barcelona defence still susceptible on crosses. Why don't they track runners, is it really that hard? It's not like they are outnumbered or anything, but you often see a single opposition player beat 3-4 Barcelona defenders gets to the end of the ball.

PS: Alba relying solely on his speed to get out of situations The more I watch him the more I dislike him.

free_cat wrote:We haven't really improved anything under Tata. Just slightly better pressing. Although it's not strange as the same players play regardless of merit. Well, let's see if we can improve, otherwise we won't do shit this seasons.

On a positive note, Neymar is clearly on form and he showed he can drible in Europe and will be an awesome player.

Don't you think it is too early to see big changes? I mean the pressing exist with him, which I can hardly say existed with last season of Pep and Tito.

Adriano injured...!

free_cat wrote:We haven't really improved anything under Tata. Just slightly better pressing. Although it's not strange as the same players play regardless of merit. Well, let's see if we can improve, otherwise we won't do shit this seasons.

On a positive note, Neymar is clearly on form and he showed he can dribble in Europe and will be an awesome player.

Tata desn't have the balls to experiment and make changes. To add insult to injury he's going around telling the world we don't need CB reinforcements!. If all he can do is motivate the team to press then we are doomed.

Missed the game, how did Malaga play? Particularly Olinga.

Malaga defended very well and created a couple of good chances thanks to our woeful defending. Olinga lost the ball countless of times trying to drible and missed an open goal.

I've seen several improvements in comparison to Tito.
first two league games = clean sheets.
last year we we're lucky if we didn't concede more then 2 goals per game.

Not quite sure how much credit Barca should get for this clean sheet. We were exposed many times and we were the outside of a post away from having a goal against us. Granted if this were last season we probably would not have walked away with a clean sheet, but I didn't find out defending to be good.

I don't think our defending is great but slightly better compared to last year
still too early to tell but comparing from the first two games of 2012-13 season yeah that's what I've noticed.

Also random question why do you guys think Tata prefers to play Pedro on the left and Sanchez on the right, with no sort of rotation??
Sanchez seemed to always play better on the left and Pedro naturally always played and started on the right... seemed a little odd to me.
annoying also that we haven't seen Tello play yet.. or Bartra or Sergi Roberto for any real minutes.

Had to miss the game, Adriano is injured again? Not really surprising, how bad is it?

How did we look offensively?

And we need to wait longer before judging Tata, Free, it takes a while for a coach to really put his stamp on a team most of the time. We've seen games where our team looks a lot different, and some where we looked similar to last year (Atletico and apparently this one). Even if we just have slightly better pressing, that's good. We need to improve on that.

CBarca wrote:Had to miss the game, Adriano is injured again? Not really surprising, how bad is it?

How did we look offensively?

And we need to wait longer before judging Tata, Free, it takes a while for a coach to really put his stamp on a team most of the time. We've seen games where our team looks a lot different, and some where we looked similar to last year (Atletico and apparently this one). Even if we just have slightly better pressing, that's good. We need to improve on that.

We looked awful offensively except Cesc.

To be fair to Tito, we were playing much better at the begining of last season (until december) than we've played this last two games.

I personally promote Martino's rotation policy. Last year that didn't exist and it hurt you towards the end. Having said that Xavi seems to be playing all the matches so he won't be at his best condition in the second half of the season. If Thiago were in the team he'd game plenty of play time I believe. We'll see if Sergi Roberto can up his game to feature in some matches.

I also think, along with bringing pressing back as a major part of Barça's game plan, he's really getting the best of his players. Almost everyone (apart from Iniesta) has been playing better than 4 months ago, with some improving significantly (Sánchez, Fàbregas for example) so credit to the Argentine.

Its still the beginning of the season!
Tata is rotating well (except for Xavi, yet to be rested)
Pressing is better than last season that's for sure, you can't expect Barcelona to press like 2008-2011 from the 1st month under Tata, give them some time.
For now, results are good and that's the most important in the beginning of the season.
Mascherano and Pique were doing okay until the last 20 minutes where we conceded 2 chances thanks to Valdes' double save and the post we didn't concede.

We have 3 tough matches now against Atletico (home, super) - Valencia (away, Liga) and Sevilla (home, Liga). Hopefully, we'll get 3 wins!

Think there's a little too much negativity because we didnt walk over this team like we did Levante.

I dont think the attack was that bad. Alexis had a pretty good game and Iniesta was good in parts also. Pedro was invisible, but at least unlike Tito he wasnt kept on for 80 minutes while clearly doing nothing.

Defensively it was pretty decent untill the last 20 minutes I felt and many of the problems we caused ourselves by slack passing from the defence.

For example defensively, Mascherano again had a very good game before his passing errors at the end.

I too feel that some things are improved compared to last season.
Pressing, certain players (cesc, alexis), rotation.
I just want to see how the team will be saped when Neymar is fully integrated and I also think that we need a CB regardless of results.
Right now I’m missing some minutes to Tello and Brtra

Agree. Yesturday might of been a good chance to move Alexis to the middle and play Tello wide.

and by wide we mean left.
the guy was pretty lost playing right in that levante game

Here we can see Mascherano awful positioning, 15 meters too deep, in the play that ended in a malaga post.

He wasn't well positioned in the header towards the end, but that was a collective blunder as Pique and Song also missed to follow the malaga forward.