I know it's late but I wanted to do this anyhow. The match against Chapecoense was something we never thought of, we never thought that Ernesto Valverde would bring back such majestic type of play which we have almost forgotten in the course of seasons.
All we had were the glimpses of a pure, fully functional LW in our head by remembering Eto'o, Villa and Pedro. We had almost forgotten how a winger should be and Neymar's absence just proved it. As Del Bosque said recently, "They have removed a player who can sometimes be capricious, Barçelona can build a better team without him."
The match against Chapecoense was the physical embodiment of the fact. Not only Deulofeu made his impact on the game by bagging 2 assists and a goal, but he made the LW look lively. He didn't try to dribble past someone to get himself a video compilation on YouTube, instead he made sensible decisions and there are numerous instances to support it.
The first and foremost, the assist to Busi, instead of trying to dribble he waited for Busi to get into right position and then passed the ball to him. He linked up Jordi at times, trying to open up the defense by one-twos. One of the less recognisable fact, we saw several over the top balls from Iniesta to Jordi, with Neymar we were not able to see that too often. Our attack was again too much from LW but atleast with a proper LW, something that relaxes me a little bit.
Talking of the wings, our RW is still not what we wanted Valverde to give us, but I think he has started to make it like the old days. The first goal was something that made me gaze at the build up, our RW was coming back, it gave me little hope after this rubbish transfer market. But tbh we are far from recovering our shattered RW.
Suarez and Messi swapped their positions a lot in the game, and whenever Suarez came to RW there was little combination faults between him Rakitic, something that scares me a lot. Aleix Vidal made overlapping runs, something that we have been waiting for a whole season after the departure of Dani.
What's the most important thing to gain from this match was that we are now less dependent on Messi, Valverde has surely made the attacks from the midfield. Under LE, we used to see our midfield wide spread, trying to escape from the opponent's pressing, now the same midfield is more centrally oriented, closer to Busquets. The departure of Neymar has reduced the burden of our attackers to do all the task, rather the midfield dictates the game now.
The simplest way to see to judge the strength of midfield is how we can easily open the midfield by simple one-twos, just by correct positioning and calmness on the ball. Even we can see those triangles being formed to make the opponent run for the ball and get a free man.
-AB
(Thanks MATS for the pics)