BarcelonaXavi Hernández will make his debut this weekend, in a derby against Espanyol at the Camp Nou, as Barça’s coach. The Barça fans and surroundings are looking to see what will be the first line-up for the Egarenc, who will have to start reversing the terrible start to the league on the bench on Saturday (the team is ninth and has four games without a win). and that next Tuesday he will play a key match in the Champions League against Benfica to certify his qualification for the round of 16. With little room for further setbacks, the brand new technician will begin to apply the conclusions about what he has seen in his first days of work, although many of the measures he has taken and will take have already been more or less sketched as he did. life in Qatar. While he has coached at Al-Sadd in recent years, at no time has he lost detail or contact with the club of his life. He has been preparing to coach Barça’s first team for a long time before signing a contract with Joan Laporta.
It should not be surprising, in this sense, his forcefulness with Ousmane Dembélé. Xavi has believed in the potential of the French winger since Barça signed him in 2017, and now, with a millimeter follow-up of his habits, he is able to train him to adapt to the football he wants to play. in practice. That is why he is asking for its renewal, an intention that, before the arrival of the new coach, was imposed on the offices more for an economic issue (to aspire to a transfer) than for sports. Nor will it be news that, at the outset, he bets blindly on Sergio Busquets, a player who understands the position game perfectly and who, in contexts of tactical rigor —such as that of Luis Enrique’s Spanish national team— does not even accuse his age (33 years) or physical limitations. Badia del Vallès will lead a squad with a majority of La Masia, Sergi Roberto joined the cause – its renewal has been reactivated – and Frenkie de Jong with the opportunity to justify his box of dominating midfielder.
Despite the good words on the day of his presentation, the certainties that Busquets offers to Xavi are not entirely homologable to the cases of the other two great captains of the squad, Jordi Alba and Gerard Piqué. Especially the central player – who will turn 35 in February and who has not completely cleared of the ligament injury to his right knee who decided not to have surgery in the middle of last season – may be affected by his participation regime, which he remained intact with Koeman despite physical vicissitudes. Now, with Araujo already recovered and Eric Garcia becoming more stable at eleven, Xavi has even opened the door internally to Umtiti, who has not made his debut this year. “Not even to see that he can play,” they point out from the club. He also thinks of Lenglet, a center that is as valid for entering the rotation as for making a drawer in the event of a juicy offer, and for Mingueza, who is a scorer and not a winger. On the other hand, it studies market opportunities such as Azpilicueta (Chelsea) or Laporte (Manchester City). All this poses a threat to Piqué, who in a recent interview with The country he made it clear that he does not want to retire “being a substitute.”
Warm up the derby, a tradition
The next few weeks and months will be key to checking if the role that the Barcelona player has played over the last decade will continue with the arrival of Xavi, a former teammate who has become a coach who, as reported by Cadena Cope, has already discouraged from participating in an interview on the show The anthill with just a few days to go before the derby, an appointment that a couple of years ago already warmed up by going to another TV show, The resistance. When they shared a dressing room, the egarenc affectionately defined Piqué as Nonsense for his media spirit. Now, determined to reset the internal code to control the day to day of the dressing room, he will have to manage it with his left hand, respecting his unstoppable business side, especially if he sees that he has to promote in the short term the Eric-Araujo couple ‘axis of defense. In the second case, he will only have to evoke how Luis Enrique, with whom he had also shared battles, treated him in his last year in the Barça first team. He was also an idol who could no longer play 60 games a year.
In any case, Piqué will be available for Xavi for the match against Espanyol after overcoming the injury to the sole he suffered on the day of Alabès. Like the Catalan scoreboard, Pedri González, Sergi Roberto, Nico and Eric Garcia, who had been injured or touched in recent matches, joined the group’s dynamics in the first session of the week. Looking ahead to the derby, if there are no scares these days, there will be four confirmed casualties, all at the front: Ansu Fati, Dembélé, Braithwaite and Kun Agüero.
