Barcelona – Athletic | Rakitic resurrects Barcelona

Barça hold on to LaLiga despite presenting clear signs of wear. He beat Athletic by a dying 1-0 in a disastrous new staging of the Blaugrana that Rakitic saved in an isolated play that exaggeratedly rewards the performance of the Blaugrana team, which took advantage of an overly shy Athletic. The Catalan team won three key points that allow them to regain the provisional leadership and buy time against terrible footballing sensations.

Barça is a very serious forecast team that aimlessly lives on the respect it continues to provoke in rivals who, if they went after him from the beginning of the game, would dismantle him. He also lives on great players and outbursts of pride. But that is not a plan.

The rest is a papier-mache decoration that will collapse sooner or later if there is no radical change. He has moments, very few, the Setien team in which he tries to remember what it was before an opposing team that fears the worst. He can continue to carry out games, but the Blaugrana set to this day is nothing more than Gloria Swanson in the Twilight of the Gods going down the stairs of his mansion thinking that he is still the great star of the cinema … mute when the sound is what reigns.

Barça is no longer a team that plays a game, lives on moments and plays at three speeds. Namely: very slow in attack, quick to recover the ball and then, whatever Messi wants. A civil servant team that imposes on rivals for what it was and because its players carry out a work in which the scene is improvised every three minutes. The game plan is non-existent.

From the start of his duel against Athletic, Barcelona was his simplest version. That of a predictable team in attack, and that lived on the corrections of Busquets, Piqué and the acceleration of Messi against an Athletic that reserved its dynamite for the second part.

Garitano left without Muniain, Iñigo Martínez, Dani García, Raúl García and Capa. And with Yuri sanctioned. All titular theorists. After the disaster of the first half, a check on the benches of both teams made it clear that the Basques had more bullets in the chamber than Setien.

After a bland first 45 minutes due to Athletic's shyness and Blaugrana incompetence, the game was at a point where either an unexpected stroke of genius by Barça solved it. Or it was from Athletic soon after he pressed and realized that Barça was a living dead.

Ten minutes after the resumption, Setién admitted Riqui Puig, a boy from the subsidiary, for an Arthur, who once again returned to work as head of replacement of staplers in a patent office. For his part, Garitano put mambo into his team with the entry of Dani García and Muniain. Capa and Villalibre followed, while the Cantabrian coach had no choice but to pull Ansu this time. The game entered its last 20 minutes in a duel between a Barça propped up by some kids who put the batteries to veterans like Rakitic, who hunted a rebound in the area to score a goal that was the defibrillator of an agonizing team. Barça is a leader, but it looks very bad.