Xavi Hernández loves talking about football. To the point of boring the staff if necessary. It was already like that when he was a player. He talked about the ball, the game and the systems with overwhelming passion. It was immediately intuited that the brain behind the best Barça in history aspired in the future to change the shorts for the blackboard to become a coach. Years later, Xavi still loves to talk about football. The third man, the free man, the base of the square... Terms that we have heard ad nauseam, but that in recent weeks either he has repeated less or they have not been the key to his speech. And that has been the worrying thing.
The Barcelona coach has pointed out to the media, has changed a call after suggestions from Deco and Joan Laporta and has tried to please his players, his sports director and his president. But in this transit it is possible that he stopped satisfying himself.
A coach like Xavi needs to return to his domain, to the ball, to strictly football terms. When the coach, after the last game against Almería, shouted to the heavens about the attitude of his men, he showed that he was getting fed up. He used words like “soul”, “shield” or “aggressiveness”, more typical of other types of technicians who are less purist with the Barça style. But he needed to put on the table everything that he had been keeping inside in recent months to try to retune the team with his reality. Xavi pressed the reset button before Christmas to issue a resounding warning to his footballers. Today the squad resumes activity to face a busy January, between League, Cup and Super Cup, the latter two competitions that are not essential, but if they are lost in a chain they represent a severe setback. The players are warned. From now on it will be seen to what extent they have grasped the message.
