La Liga: FC Barcelona 0 - Malaga CF 1

La Liga game.

Early kickoff.

Need to save energy for Champions League on Tuesday.

Rotations possible.

Dropped points last time around because they parked the airbus.

Will park spaceshuttle in Camp Nou.

Should still win.

Predicted lineups:

Barca: 11 players from our squad.

Malaga: 11 players from their squad.

Visca Barca.

Alves new contract

crosselona

This is horrible to watch.

433 to 424 to 3313?

These refs are tripping. Act like Malaga are playing some epic offside trap

The team was so bad tonight. That was a horrible, horrible display.

Old problems, no new solutions. Malaga got a lucky break with Alves flopping and this allowed them to park a submarine. We can't counter if there are always 7 men in the box and they were more than happy to give us the ball. We tried the things that didn't work last season, pushing everyone into the box, moving and pressing in the box (but we were always offside...), turning into Crosselona etc. Vintage performance by us against parked buses.

Surprised not more people have chined in on this crap game. Also hate that we lost right before the City game, while they just had a huge game today. Toure does wonders to that City midfield and he's back just in time to face us

meh just saw the game not much to talk about other than the obvious.

alves sucks and i am glad we are not re-signing him.
messi had his worst game of the season and not surprisingly when he has a bad day apparently everyone else does too.

we bought suarez and neymar for less reliance on one player..
they did nothing either the whole game.

we had almost zero intensity, until the last 5 minutes no one looked like they gave a damn

but..but..some suarez fanboy had been saying finally we have a solution for PTB problem...

I don't really get to watch football as much as I used to but here is my thought on the game.

Your two central midfielders had an average degree of influence on the team when the match started. It was far from vintage Barça where almost everything would go through the midfield but your midfielders still saw plenty of the ball. I had the feeling that slowly your pressure would start to creep onto Málaga's defence and you'd start upping the tempo. You'd score, Málaga would come out and concede more and more. We've seen that a few times this season haven't we.

Once you conceded however everything changed. Suddenly your midfielders became completely anonymous. The ball would go straight from Busquets to wingers. Iniesta and Rafinha started drifting more inside the opposition traffic and I don't understand the reason for it.

What was worse was your wingers started to cut in. Not only your wingers but also Rafinha whom I find extremely one footed and likes to naturally drift inside. That made it easy for Málaga defenders to clog up the centre again, giving Barcelona time on the flanks knowing they'd cut in 9 out of 10 times. The only way I see that working is Messi cutting in and Neymar and Alba making trademark runs behind the defenders from their flank to receive a long pass from Messi. But this tactic is becoming more and more predictable and as you saw Málaga defenders had your wingers covered all the time as they made their moves.

It wasn't until you brought on Pedro and actually creating numerical advantage in the final third that you started looking a bit more dangerous. But by then it was already too late and your team had forgotten the game plan (if there was any), resorting to desperate attempts by Messi from the middle while finding himself against 4 Málaga defenders charging towards him and losing the ball consequently.

Suárez YET AGAIN had a poor performance. His one touch play is very poor to say the least, I'd have prefer someone with much less footballing talent such as Giroud than him if he's to play the back-behind-the-goal type striker role. He just did not do anything, getting caught offside a lot like previous matches and taking poor touches, failing to beat his man etc.

Honourable mention to Málaga who defended extremely well and all their 11 players performed well as a unit. But I can't help but think Barcelona didn't do much to challenge them.

I don't really think clogging up the box with our players to achieve numerical superiority is that smart a strategy. It clogs up the box even more giving our players less space to take advantage of without running into each other and exposes our defense more.

Take the last play for instance, Messi spots Neymar doing a run so he sends him a lobbed pass which Pique intercepts and fumbles. I would have trusted Neymar to finish that much better than Gerrard.

I agree about the midfield as well but I don't think it was an isolated case, we have been playing without our midfield this entire season.

Suarez awareness of his offside positioning is quite frustrating to watch, especially when your chasing the game and he is starting his runs from offside positions, or he never actually gets onside as the attack progresses...it was the one thing I didnt like about Ibrahimovic when he was here (I like alot of other things about his game though, but thats another story).

The La Liga linesman being blind isnt something new, sometimes it favours it, sometimes it doesnt...not a point worth talking about.

One a bigger note, I guess you can say the team was due to lose eventually...but on the other hand, it is very poor timing and maybe not luck than we fail to go top of the league when given the chance, as its not the first time.