BARCELONA
Xavi hits out at the press after slim LaLiga win over Alavés
The Catalan coach blamed the press for Barça’s struggles, saying that the coverage of his side has been “exaggerated and very critical”.
Surely animated after the win and liberated after suffering a huge amount of tension above an beyond normal levels in the LaLiga game against Alavés, Xavi took shots against the “exaggerated and very critical” press once the final whistle blew.
His words don’t surprise the people who know him. The coach is usually very aware of what is being said about him and especially the messages from the media. Xavi felt the heat of the spotlight after the loss to Real Madrid and things got even hotter after terrible consecutive performances from him side against Real Sociedad and Shakhtar Donetsk. Two games with different outcomes but the same path taken: suffering.
Catalan media outlet SER Cataluya even revealed that last Thursday the directors who had flown to Germany for the UEFA Champions League group stage game were critical of the lineup out by the coach, one which in their view impeded Barça from winning and therefore pocketing more than €2 million in qualification rewards.
‘It was a good thing Laporta wasn’t here’
It doesn’t stop there, as one director even commented that “it was a good thing the President [Joan Laporta] didn’t travel”, given the presumed anger that would have filled his frame that would have come with watching the crumbling performance live.
Xavi cut an uncomfortable figure post-game against Alavés, saying he had isolated himself from the media since Thursday yet being “without a doubt” sure that their criticism of the side had affected his players (”they were more nervous than usual given everything that had gone on around them”).
He was the first person to publicly mention Gündogan’s mistake for the goal conceded and in a classic moment of peak Xavi, he went back to the days when he was a player: “I told them to be calm at half-time, nobody gets at anyone here. They also told me that I was the cancer of Barcelona and here I am as manager”.
Us vs them: Barcelona against the world
The words of the manager clashed like perpendicular lines when put next to the images of Lewandowski, the player who dug Barcelona out of the hole as Alavés piled on the pressure at Montjuïc and missed chance after glaring chance. The Polish striker scored two but footage captured during the game showed him refusing to shake the hand of 16-year-old teammate Lamine Yamal, something which will undoubtedly generate a reaction, given how highly the youngster is valued by the fanbase. While Lamine Yamal, at such a young age, is rightly protected from press criticism, on the pitch he received the wrath of 35-year-old Robert Lewandowski.
According to RAC-1 in Cataluña, after the game against Alavés, the message in the dressing room was that the press were against Barcelona, apparently as a way of grouping everyone together: us vs them, a way to get everyone rowing in the right direction.
Xavi assured that last year “much worse” times were had but the truth is that after the game against Shakhtar, he could not avoid the murmuring coming from the directors at the club, worried about the lack of progress on the pitch. The result against Alavés gives Xavi space to breathe, but games are coming up that will define just how good Barcelona are. As well as playing Porto in the Champions League, with first place up for grabs, Atlético Madrid and Girona are decisive fixtures in order to keep up their title fight. For now, it seems like Xavi has found his enemy.