Kicking off the La Liga season with a perfect five wins from their first five matches, Barcelona have been rolling, but they haven’t had to face much adversity under new manager Hansi Flick so far. While scoring 17 goals and allowing four is quite an impressive feat, how Barcelona are able to respond when things aren’t in their favor is just as important. In the Champions League against Monaco, we’re getting a taste of that even with Barcelona losing 2-1 in an away trip to France.
Playing in midfield, Eric Garcia was sent off with a straight red card only 10 minutes into the match for denial of a goalscoring opportunity against Takumi Minamino. Six minutes later, Monaco found their opening goal and it seemed like the match would get out of hand for the Spanish giants. But that’s where a moment of magic can turn things on its head.
It, of course, came from none other than 17-year-old Lamine Yamal. After breaking out for Barcelona last season and becoming a crucial part of the Span national team en route to them winning the European Championship, he’s still finding another level to his game. Yamal checked his run perfectly to stay onside before delivering quite a strike to beat Phillipp Kohn in net.
Take a look at the goal:
With that finish, Yamal became the second youngest player to ever score for Barcelona in the Champions League behind Ansu Fati. It’s a goal that provides Barcelona hope which is also what his presence has done for the team. While you never want to put pressure on someone so young, he’s growing by the day and showing that he can be one of the players who can carry Barcelona.
“Lamine, he’s a fantastic player, the goal he scored was great to give us confidence back but also, we have to protect this player, these kind of players,” Flick said following the match. “In La Liga, in the Champions League because it’s very important but at his age and with his quality it’s good to have him.”
Monaco took advantage of a poor pass by Barcelona to score the go-ahead goal in the match but Barcelona looked dangerous on the counterattack. Yamal and Raphinha did a lot in transition to make things work but for Flick, he needs to show that this result is a blip instead of the start of a trend.
Going down to 10 men 10 minutes in, there’s only so much that a team can do and Flick did address that following the match but Barcelona’s depth concerns showed. Without Dani Olmo, Garcia had to slide into midfield and all of Barcelona’s subs during the match were under 25 years of age.
Managing a squad with players so young in key roles puts a lot of pressure on Flick’s management and also goes back to his point about protection. He can’t just set these guys out and let them run themselves into the ground especially playing multiple high-level games in the same week.
Next up is a match against Villarreal during the weekend where Barcelona can look to keep their unbeaten run going in La Liga. Do that and it’ll be easy to put this behind them. There are seven matches remaining in the league stage of the Champions League and plenty of teams didn’t pick up maximum points on Matchday 1. With seven more matches, it’s all about how Barcelona take lessons from this to do better in matchday two.
