The first part of Barça’s campaign leaves many certainties. The fans, who are filling the old Camp Nou as in the best times, are having a great time with the goals and the academic movements of Lewandowski, a ram of the era who still wants to live in the present. You can also see the great level of the reborn Dembélé, who at the age of 25, and well led by Xavi, has finally decided to become a footballer after five years of being limited to playing ball. The French winger mixes well with Raphinha, a newcomer with a desire to revel, and lives very happily a few meters in front of the superlative Pedri and the surprising Balde, two of the young faces who represent the generational change that sends Piqué and Jordi Alba to warm the bench like never
So many readings are accumulated after six League games and two Champions League games that there are some that remain in the background. One of them is the confirmed fact that the best full-back in the squad is central. The sports area was looking for Jules Kounde as the definitive replacement for Piqué and, for the moment, what it finds in the Frenchman is mainly a footballer capable of covering the right side of the defense with a perfect mixture of forcefulness in the mark, clairvoyance with the ball and contained depth. And not because he can’t start in the central axis, but because Azpilicueta, who was Xavi’s priority target for the right lane, got tired of waiting for Barça.
We will never know what would have happened to Navarrese if his representative had been Mendes, Zahavi or Ramadani, but that is no longer so important. Now the priority is to make Kounde understand that the needs of the team demand that he be the starting right-back even if he prefers to consolidate himself as a scorer. The international bleu it does so well that it not only ostensibly improves the experiments with Araujo open on the wing, but it goes above the competition that promised to star Bellerín (last-minute solution to Azpilicueta’s pumpkins) and Sergi Roberto in a position that he has not had a clear master since the first Dani Alves.
If Xavi didn’t have enough with the difficult management of the ostracism of the captains or the balances to justify the participation with droppers of Ansu Fati, now it is also his job to prevent Kounde from suffering from the syndrome of the central who did not want to be a side (or the winger who discovered that he could be central and never wanted to be a winger again). At Real Madrid they know the symptoms well and know that they are not easy to cure. They experienced them last season with David Alaba, a few years ago with Sergio Ramos and both ended up getting away with it. In other words, imposing his will and occupying one of the two positions in the axis of defense.
