Both the coach and the goalkeeper Joan García attributed the difficulty of closing the games to the fatigue accumulated by the schedule.
Barcelona victory to Albacete this Tuesday by 2-1 to advance to the semifinals of the King’s Cupbut the players Gerard Martin y Joan Garcia and the coach Hansi Flick agree that their team He should have taken better advantage of his scoring opportunities in the match.
The Culé team was largely dominant during long stretches of the match, but the La Mancha team, which in previous instances of the tournament eliminated Celta and Real Madridconverted the discount 4 minutes from the end, via Javi Morenoand then there was on the verge of forcing overtime on the last play of the party.
The one who was clearest about his frustration with the development was Martín, key to maintaining the result thanks to a clearance on the line of his goal in that last game action. The left back summarized the general feeling of the squad in his post-match statements: “These games, if you don’t close them soon, in the end you end up suffering“.
“I was angry about the goal disallowed for offside and I was lucky enough to be able to get the ball, when I saw that he controlled it and I got under the goal“, the footballer from Cornellà recounted that intervention, who also alluded to an assist he gave to Ferran Torres a few minutes earlier that would have given the result more slack, but the goal was disallowed for offside.
His partner later expressed himself in the same vein. Joan Garciawhich identified that the lack of clarity in the definition is a problem that Barcelona has been dealing with for a long time: “In these last games we are missing a sentence. But the important thing is to have the opportunities and there are days when they don’t want to go in“.
Later, Flick once again underlined this idea in his press conference, where he also regretted the closeness in the result and development: “We have created many chances and again we have failed. In the end it was very close, but it could have been easier. I think we made it harder for ourselves.“.
“We know how to create opportunities, but we need to take advantage of them better. We are aware of this“, completed the German.
Barcelona’s mentality, the point to highlight
The protagonists agree that the Blaugrana team should not have suffered in the last minutes, but also that The mentality demonstrated during the match was correct. The technical director justified the difficulties that his team went through when talking about the busy calendar that Barcelona is facing: “We have to improve the definition, but we cannot talk about the mentality. If you look at how we played on Wednesday, Saturday and today, Tuesday, the team is fighting until the end. These Cup matches have to be won and it has been done“.
“We play on Wednesday, we play on Saturday and today is Tuesday: three games in less than a week. That’s what I mean when I say that the team is always present. We dominated the first half and also the second, although in the end the defense cost us a little more. We have to define better, but we have to pay attention to the fact that in less than a week we have played three games, I am proud of the team. We are in a good moment and we have to continue working,” Flick added.
García also focused on the pace and demand of the club’s matches and the fact of being fighting, once again, on all fronts: “My teammates played the game they had to play. It has been a very intense month of January and we have entered the top 8 of the Champions League, which has been something very important. We have to take advantage of this month of February to prepare well“.
For his part, Martín recalled the previous blows that Albacete dealt in the Copa del Rey and praised the team for avoiding them: “We knew that the attitude today was very important, that it was a team that was going to put a lot of pressure on us. We already saw what happened with Celta and Real Madrid and we have been plugged in from the beginning“.
