Hard to swallow

Barça

Last month I wrote “It is hard to see how things could have gone much bet­ter for Barça since Ath­letic knocked them out of the Copa del Rey.” Well it doesn’t take long for things to change in foot­ball, and it’s hard to see how things could have gone worse for Xavi’s side than in the last two weeks of April. They did gain a hard-fought three points away at high-fly­ing Real So­ciedad, grind­ing out a 1-0 win thanks to yet an­other goal from Jan­u­ary singing Aubameyang and an all-round spir­ited per­for­mance, but that came in the mid­dle of three shock home de­feats that rocked Barça’s world.

There was mass dis­ap­proval around the city and con­dem­na­tion from the foot­balling world and media in gen­eral when al­most 30,000 Ger­man fans took over not only the Barcelona streets but also the sta­dium for the sec­ond-leg tie of the club’s quar­ter final against Ein­tra­cht Frank­furt. An in­ter­nal en­quiry was launched by pres­i­dent Joan La­porta after Barça crashed out of Eu­rope’s sec­ond tier tour­na­ment in a 2-3 home de­feat fu­elled by huge num­bers of white-shirted Ger­man fans tak­ing over var­i­ous sec­tions of the Camp Nou. Some­thing had clearly gone wrong to allow so many away fans to get hold of tick­ets, and de­spite La­porta’s claims that the club were re­spon­si­ble but not guilty for the mass re­sale of tick­ets via agen­cies and the club’s own fans, the im­pres­sion that Barça and their fans were more in­ter­ested in money than pro­gress­ing in the Eu­ropa League lead to scathing com­ments. The fact that the fol­low­ing two home games saw the side lose 1-0 to lowly op­po­si­tion – Cádiz and Rayo Val­le­cano, two teams bat­tling rel­e­ga­tion - high­lighted the feel­ing that the Frank­furt game may have done more harm than orig­i­nally thought.

So what has gone so hor­ri­bly wrong for Xavi’s side on the pitch? The basic pat­tern is that Barça are un­able to break down tena­cious and well or­gan­ised op­po­si­tion, and need far more chances to score a goal than their op­po­si­tion. Those dreamy days of 4-0 wins out­play­ing Madrid in the Bern­abeu are now a dis­tant mem­ory and al­though Xavi’s num­ber one goal when he ar­rived, that of drag­ging the team into the Cham­pi­ons League places for next sea­son, ap­pears to be all but achieved, ques­tions now abound around the prodi­gal son’s abil­ity to mo­ti­vate a side that has wilted under pres­sure and seen ei­ther bad luck or poor prepa­ra­tion when it comes to se­ri­ous in­juries to key play­ers. The “we have X num­ber of fi­nals left to se­cure Cham­pi­ons League foot­ball” mantra has been whit­tled down to five games but surely a six point cush­ion over Betis is enough…?

Es­panyol

For their part, Es­panyol’s April also left a lot to be de­sired, with five league games pro­duc­ing four de­feats and one im­por­tant vic­tory. To be fair, the periq­ui­tos faced a month with three of the most chal­leng­ing away fix­tures imag­in­able, at Real So­ciedad Atlético and a title-chas­ing Real Madrid, but the 1-0 home de­feat to Rayo in the penul­ti­mate game of the month felt like a big blow for a side that had been on a three-game home win­ning run. The one win of the month came at the ex­pense of lowly Celta at home, a Wu Lei goal from yet an­other Sergi Darder as­sist seal­ing three points that left Vi­cente’s side safely clear of the rel­e­ga­tion places on 39 points.

The de­feat at Atlético was a par­tic­u­larly hard one to swal­low after a con­tro­ver­sial 100th minute penalty for hand­ball against Raul De Tomas de­prived Es­panyol of a point, a bizarre case of light­ning strik­ing twice after they had also lost to a goal by Atlético in 10 min­utes of added time in the re­verse fix­ture ear­lier in the sea­son. Vi­cente did not agree with the use of VAR to award the penalty, and it was cruel blow for a side that looked to have won a hard-earned point in a dif­fi­cult sta­dium.

Es­panyol now have four games re­main­ing to try and climb into the top half of La Liga, a goal that does not seem out of the ques­tion with home games against Os­asuna and Va­len­cia and away fix­tures at Alavés and Granada.

Girona

Two wins and two de­feats to nil for Girona in April mean that Michel’s side find them­selves among the play-off places with just five games re­main­ing. Fans will not be hold­ing their breath at the prospect of pro­mo­tion given the club’s atro­cious play-off record over the past ten years, but at least it gives them some­thing to look for­ward to if they can keep their com­po­sure and end the sea­son in the top six. The other sides cur­rently in the play-off places are Val­ladolid, Tener­ife and Oviedo, the lat­ter hav­ing gone on a blis­ter­ing run of five straight wins to leapfrog Pon­fer­rad­ina into sixth, just one point be­hind Girona. Girona them­selves have only a four-point cush­ion from sev­enth place, so the race for the play-off places is re­ally heat­ing up, al­though a home game with Tener­ife on May 9 is the only one against a rival in the top ten, mean­ing Girona’s des­tiny is very much in its own hands.

Re­turn­ing to last month’s ac­tion, Girona won both their home games (1-0 v Malaga and 2-0 v Real So­ciedad B), and lost both of their away games (1-0 at Zaragoza and 3-0 at Carta­gena). De­spite the score line, the loss to Carta­gena did not leave coach Michel con­cerned, as his side just failed to take their chances in a very equal game, while the hosts took all of theirs. “I’m very sat­is­fied with the team’s dis­play, de­spite the re­sult,” he de­clared after the game. Girona will need to be more ruth­less in front of goal if they are to main­tain their hopes of pro­mo­tion to La Liga through the play-offs.