Barcelona Ban Lifted At The Right Time

When Neymar, Luis Suarez and Lionel Messi are capable of scoring 180 goals combined in a calendar year, it is easy to understand why Barcelona would rely so heavily upon them. Yet even that extraterrestrial trio can’t do everything all the time. So it was that after 18 rounds of the 2015-16 La Liga season, Espanyol became the first side to prevent every member of the Blaugrana’s starting strike force from finding the net.

Saturday’s scoreless derby was the latest in a string of Barca hiccups: three draws in their past four league games equate to dropping half of the points available in that span. As a consequence, Atletico Madrid have been afforded two chances in three weeks to become provisional leaders of La Liga, the second of which the Colchoneros took with a 1-0 win vs. Levante.

Barcelona can’t expect to win every match but there is a recurring theme emerging from those draws. Namely, the lack of depth: With the players currently at Luis Enrique’s disposal, it’s been impossible to change games in a positive fashion from the bench.

Signs of that thinness were clear in the 1-1 draw at Valencia on Dec. 5, where the Barca coach resisted from making even one substitution. It suggested Enrique’s scepticism as to how well the players on the bench could step up in a key fixture. Fears over the quality of supporting players were arguably confirmed in the subsequent 2-2 draw with Deportivo, when Barcelona let a 2-0 lead slip once the Asturian made three changes (Sandro Ramirez, Ivan Rakitic and Jordi Alba were replaced by Munir El Haddadi, Sergi Roberto and Jeremy Mathieu) midway through the second half. Last weekend against Espanyol, Enrique’s lack of trust in his fringe players again looked apparent as he only made use of one of his three changes despite the initial XI drawing a blank.

Those moves aren’t indicative of someone who thinks he has a fully competitive squad, one capable of maintaining consistent levels of quality from the first XI down the line. Considering some of the performances from Barca’s back-up players over the past six months, such concerns would be entirely understandable.

Ramirez was one of the individuals not used at Cornella-El Prat, and is symptomatic of the scarce quality on the Barca bench. Ostensibly a striker, he has failed to score a single time in either the league or Champions League this season, appearing just once in the past six league rounds. He looks well short of the level required to play for one of the best teams in the world at the moment, producing only brief flourishes of promise before disappearing for large spells. Rarely offering any solutions for his coach, his contribution has been minimal at best since he was fully promoted to the first team last year.

Fellow back-up forward Munir has been better but only slightly. Another unused substitute against Espanyol, his goal tally in the 2015-16 league and Champions League also stands at zero. Unlike Sandro, the Madrid native at least has one meaningful performance from the bench to boast of, when he was subbed on with Barca 1-0 down to Bayer Leverkusen last September and assisted the two home goals that turned the game around. But that big performance was three months ago.