Who’s To Blame?
There has been plenty of debate in the last couple of days over what we have been lacking in recent weeks. Our drop in form has seen us lose a five point lead over Real Madrid and has cast serious doubts about our ability to reclaim La Liga this season. Without naming anybody Johan Cruyff claimed that certain players are not playing at their level which led to one of the local papers running a poll asking which players Cruyff was referring to. The result was not too surprising with Zlatan Ibrahimovic receiving 55% of the vote. It is clear that Zlatan is going through a bad patch at the moment, and while it is true that players often need time to adapt to a new team and system, I don’t particularly agree with this argument in Zlatan’s case as he was playing pretty well before christmas and has only been off-form in the period since then.
Our defence was also at fault in Saturday’s draw. Some might point out that we were without Gerard Piqué and Eric Abidal who were also both missing in our defeat at Atletico Madrid. They are both important players but their replacements Milito and Maxwell were not at fault at Almeria and the goals could be blamed more on Dani Alves and Carles Puyol who nobody would normally want to criticise. The pairing of Puyol and Milito as centre backs can sometimes see us struggling to bring the ball out of defence as neither of them is particularly strong in this department and there is probably a better balance with one of our other cenral defenders playing.
Players such as Pedro, Busquets and Maxwell get their fair share of criticism but given their individual ability I feel that they are playing close to their best. Perhaps it is our "better" players such as Xavi and Iniesta who are much further from the levels we have come to expect from them. Then of course there are players who haven’t played much recently but who this season, when they do play, are not playing as well as we would hope for, such as Henry, Marquez, Toure and Chygrynskiy.
However, despite all this we still have two points more this season than at the same stage last season so we can’t be playing that badly. It was always going to be complicated to repeat a season like 2008/2009 but the fact that Real Madrid are looking very strong has set off the alarm bells among fans. I’ve seen this many times over the years – it doesn’t really matter how well or badly we are playing, if we are above Madrid then things are fine but if not then we are in crisis. Madrid arguably have the easier run in, so we are going to have to find something extra in the next ten weeks to win the title. Last season we finished top with 87 points, this season we may need to get well over 90 if we are going to end the season as champions.