This article is part of Football FanCast’s Off the Bench series, which places in-game managerial decisions and squad selections under FFC’s microscope.
Barcelona barely scraped a 1-0 victory over Slavia Prague just the other night. And a big part of the blame should be on Ernesto Valverde for failing to react properly with his substitutions.
Snapshot
It really did not seem like it was going to be one of those nights in the Champions League for Barcelona.
After all, things started off so well – Lionel Messi rattled Slavia Prague’s net in the opening couple of minutes and at that moment, many would have already completely written the hosts off.
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But despite competing with one of the biggest teams in Europe, the Czechs did not yield and equalised through Jan Boril.
In the end, Barcelona were lucky to get their second – which was an own goal caused by a deflection – and hold onto their lead until the final whistle.
But that second half was horrible by all standards and Valverde’s substitutes didn’t really help either.
A bad reaction
The three substitutions Valverde made were the following: Ousmane Dembele for Antoine Griezmann, Arturo Vidal for Sergio Busquets and Ivan Rakitic for Arthur Melo.
None of those worked the way the coach envisioned it.
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Griezmann was the only one of the front three who was doing some defensive work and running in that front line. Leaving both Luis Suarez and Lionel Messi on the pitch together for the full 90 minutes meant that Barcelona virtually had no press to stop Slavia Prague from freely controlling the game.
Dembele, for all his talent, didn’t bring much to the team as he squandered a lot of passes, maintaining only 70% accuracy and losing the ball six times.
With Arthur and Busquets out of the game, Valverde practically surrendered all the control over to their opponents.
Two of his most important pieces that usually orchestrate Blaugrana’s play were suddenly removed and neither Vidal nor Rakitic managed to stabilise the game.
In fact, the last ten minutes when the subs were being made were even worse – just in that short span of time, Barcelona yielded ten shots, were less accurate in their passing and had fewer touches than their opposition.
It seems that Valverde’s plan was to somehow kill the game and try and close it out but instead, he probably made the situation even worse.
His idea was to add in some physicality to replace the technique but it almost backfired and lost them the game.