The Barça of candies | Soccer | Sports

They should put up a “for experts only” sign. Or the classic warning that we should not try it in our homes without professional supervision. It is dangerous to start a Flick Barça game thinking about imitating with your team something of what you are going to see. I am suffering. I imagine the defenses of children’s teams in the middle of the field, trying to set a trap for their rival so that they fall offside. I’m seeing it. The left center back pushing his teammates forward and the full back taking two steps back and three forward to readjust the line and avoid disaster. I see them. I see them sprinting backwards when the pass is put behind their backs, with their arms up asking for the flag to be raised. If the elite is going millimeters and with VAR, I can’t even imagine the risk in games without assistants.

It can be a bleeding. Doing poorly or half-heartedly that kamikaze plan of defending 50 meters from your goal is an invitation for your goalkeeper to have a dozen one-on-ones in each game. An agony. A hole. That is the anguish that, little by little and with performances as emphatic as the one on Wednesday in Montjuïc against Bayern, Barça fans are getting rid of with the ultra-brave strategy of their new coach. Hansi Flick has seduced Barcelona fans with very high-tempo football, with a game at the limit, dizzying. Everything on the wire. Everything at maximum. Everything in detail.

He averages more than three goals per game. It is the highest scoring team in Europe. It’s sweet. He generates more probability of scoring than anyone else and is able to find supreme levels of efficiency with an extremely offensive and vertical style. Everyone seems to be playing with binoculars, looking very long. There are no disconnected remotes in the Flick manual. Everyone is involved in the game. In attack and in defense.

The most amazing thing to see about this new, fresh and loose Barça is how he chains defensive jumps, how he prepares the sequence to drown his rival. Leaving him without options. It seems so obvious that against them you have to attack the depth, run on that treasure in the opposite field that leaves between defense and goalkeeper, that the rivals rush. They fall into the trap. Five, seven, eleven offsides. Bayern managed to avoid them with diagonals and second line entries, but ended up equally frustrated by the inability to play anything other than attacking the final third vertically. Flick does not allow anything else. He shows you the candy, but doesn’t let you eat it.

It seems like a simple plan, but it is not. There is rigor, there is synchronicity, there is intensity. Very difficult to replicate without some of the nuances. When you are going to press, you go because you know that they will continue to come from behind. The plan doesn’t work without the domino effect, and the few times one hesitates and doesn’t follow the jump, Flick adjusts it. He reminds them that if everyone doesn’t go, the gear fails. He has convinced them to continue because he has planned the adjustments and has committed all the pieces to doing A when A and B when A could not be done. It is impeccable choreography, almost seamless. Only suitable for the brave. Two rhombuses.

In the first big test of the week, Flick did not give up a single meter in his manual of defending forward. He didn’t care about Kane, Gnabry or Musiala and he was not intimidated by the fears he inherited against Bayern. What will he do against Vinicius and Mbappé?