We will be watching Chelsea tonight...we might love Graham Potter just a little bit.
After their summer of spending as though the end of the world was nigh – we’ll get back to you on that – Barcelona have started their season in La Liga looking very much like the Barcelona of old.
This group had ‘Group of Death’ written all over it from the outset. Losing it and dropping into the Europa League may have financial ramifications for a club whoseheavily implies that even latter stages of the Champions League money isn’t enough to keep them on the financial straight and narrow. The effects of Potterball are becoming evident, and they’re doing so quickly. With Reece James excelling, they’re already starting to look quite a lot like what Todd Boehly would have intended when he hired Graham Potter in the first place and a win in the San Siro, one of European football’s truly iconic homes, would be a suitable cherry on the cake for what has been a successful first month for the new manager.
A failure to win this game wouldn’t be a disaster in a mathematical sense. PSG play Benfica in Paris on the same evening, so at least one of those two will drop points, and Juventus travel to Lisbon for their return match against Benfica in two weeks’ time. It would be a stretch to say that their chances of getting through the group stages would be substantially improved with a win in Haifa , the psychological effects of failing to win could be huge.
Nothing changed in respect of Salah being forced into wider positions with the replacement of Sadio Mane with Darwin Nunez, so how joined-up was the thinking at the time of Salah’s contract extension being agreed in the summer? Has all this been factored in? Because increasingly, it doesn’t look like it.
At his best, Salah can be a whirling dervish of a player, a perpetual motion machine with an unerring eye for goal. Squeezed out on the right-hand side, he isn’t getting the sort of chances but this shortfall doesn’t seem to have really been picked up by anyone else, other than on that one occasion against Bournemouth. But while the going has become extremely difficult for him, he has to start delivering again.
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