LALIGA
Xavi post-game press conference: “Gavi’s handball is invented, this is a shambles”
The Barça boss started the season off in fine fashion, criticising the referees heavily after the 0-0 draw to Getafe.
I fully realise that the game-plan with which Getafe ‘attack’ games of football, especially against the top sides, is to frustrate, but even for Xavi, this is impressive. Match Day One of LaLiga EA Sports got underway this weekend and Barcelona started the season off with a stodgy 0-0 draw against eternal annoyances, Getafe. That is not an insult: Getafe under Bordalás are more Simeone than Simeone, in the way Guardiola is more Cruyff than Cruyff. And it works superbly, a point against the LaLiga champions is no mean feat.
Who is not happy about it, however, is Xavi Hernández, who saw Raphinha sent off before getting himself an early shower thanks to a red card. Jaime Mata was also red carded in a game that exploded from minute one at the Coliseum Alfonso Pérez in south Madrid. After the energetic affair, Xavi emerged from the dressing room like a race horse, galloping across the pitch towards the fourth official, who received a bona-fide earful.
Xavi has his say on ‘incomprehensible decisions’
“I told him that he was giving them a lot of fouls and not us”, said the angry man, “and that’s why he sent me off. The other day we had a meeting and the first change that they told us would be to understand better the managers, and that’s not what has happened today.”
Whether or not you believe that the very first thing the RFEF officials told the managers ahead of the new LaLiga season was that they were going to be better understood is, as they say, for the reader to decide, but my eyebrows do stretch upwards at the suggestion. Xavi, despite meaning well, does have a habit of sounding like a child who would wait all day to ask his parents for sweets at the counter of the shop, in front of the till assistant.
“They also told is that they would go to VAR less. I don’t understand. Why are they not going to go [to the VAR] if it is a fair and helpful tool? They are incomprehensible decisions.”
‘We’re not selling a good product’, says Barça boss
Raphinha saw red for an elbow that perfectly encapsulated the plan laid out by Getafe: make potentially angry player angry. “I think it’s an accumulation of things”, said Xavi, “[the referees] allow too much and then blow fouls against us. But whatever, that’s that. Last year we started off the same and look how we ended up.”
Despite the anger, rage and fury, Xavi did say he felt “happy” as the team “played well” with 10 players. “We had chances”, he added, “but we didn’t manage to take advantage of them.”
And then, after that brief ray of sunlight, the conversation flipped back right into the palm of the journalists, fingers flicking furiously over keyboards like armies of worker ants in a puddle of a spilled energy drink, curled corners of lips being suppressed as the handle of the Jack-in-the-box was wound up again. “The referee is the one who allows it, there’s no other explanation. I think they allow too much, and if that’s what we sell from LaLiga, we’re doing badly, we’re not selling a good product.”
Gavi’s handball was ‘invented’, says Xavi
“I don’t see a hand [from Gavi] anywhere”, he continued, cogs now fully oiled and in top gear, “it’s invented. That’s what they said, that they wouldn’t blow for it unless it was clear. I didn’t like the meeting the other day, and the same goes for today.”
Xavi jumped from refereeing decisions on bookings to refereeing decisions on added time, saying “the time thing” was “a shambles. “Just do ball-in-play time, and that’s it. It’s a joke that they’ve added 20 minutes, we’re making fools of ourselves”.
Barcelona’s next game is against Cádiz at home-from-home Montjuic Olympic Stadium on Sunday, 20 August with kick off at 3:30 pm (ET) / 12:30 p.m. PT.
