According to official statistics, the Ronald Koeman footballer took 52 penalties in LaLiga and only missed six. Koeman played for Barça between 1989 and 1995. With 88.4%, and historically, he is one of the three great penalty shooters at the club, along with Messi and Kubala. How is it possible that Koeman allowed Braithwaite to take a penalty ahead of Griezmann, a player that cost 120 million euros; De Jong, which cost 86; from Pjanic, a player with a reputed free-throw shooter resume? It's an absolute X-file. The fact is that it happened. And that Braithwaite, a player who shouldn't have been at Barça and who has been because of a serious injury to Suárez and another to Dembélé, took the penalty and missed it. Braithwaite not only arrived at Barça by accident. It was for sale. But is.
But Braithwaite, who is doing what he can at Barça, is not the problem. It is the symptom. Koeman allowed what happened at the start of the game, a sign of loss of control (the one that was in the game) that connects perfectly with everything that begins to overflow.
Nobody can explain why the coach repeated with the Valladolid system at the Camp Nou. Playing with Mingueza, Araújo and Lenglet at home is an attack on the historical identity of the team. It could be a resource, as he himself explained in Valladolid, but not a plan. Less with three centrals with such a markedly defensive profile and without any leadership. But the coach did not intervene.
With Messi in the stands, in another of those strange explanations from Barça that the coach begins to accompany suspiciously, no one told Braithwaite that perhaps he was not the one to shoot. At least, not the franchise player to start the game for Barça. But he swallowed with that. And Braithwaite failed. And Barça did not win.
Braithwaite's error comes to add to that system change that throws his 4-2-3-1 theory to the ground. Koeman has taken a devilish turn on the matter. Not only has the boat been pulled from a system that he promised as the ignition key to start a new Barça. On the contrary, he has retraced the path and, scared by what happened after the games against Juventus and Valencia, he removed an attacking player and put a defender in Valladolid. It is a radical renunciation of an idea. But it can make sense if it turns out to be circumstantial. He himself was in charge of making it normal in a league match against Eibar. And that was added to the fact that the leader to whom he has returned, Messi, did not play the game for some mild reasons.
The same ones that make him lose credibility with public opinion and, surely, trust in the dressing room. Waking up little by little, Koeman loses control. Nothing to do with that absolutely effective player in front of the penalty spot, the same one who neglected so that the spirited Braithwaite gambled the fate of a club with a billion euros budget on Russian roulette.