Xavi Hernández refused to speak of “failure” as Ronald Araujo had no qualms about admitting. He preferred to speak of “very big disappointment”, but understood that it was spoken in terms of “failure”. “If it is, you’ll have to learn from your mistakes,” he admitted. He saw many. At least one for each goal. Surely there were many more, because Marc-André ter Stegen avoided a more crude and bulky goleada.
“It has been a fateful night,” said the Barça coach, “everything has gone wrong for us,” acknowledging that Eintracht has been superior in both games. “We have been good neither in Frankfurt nor at home,” he said, attributing this inferiority to a footballing problem of Barça, unable to impose its weapons or, in any case, counter Eintracht’s.
One was to get a great atmosphere at the Camp Nou similar to the first leg. He asked for it at the end of the first meeting. He insisted on the eve of the return. Not only did it not happen, but Barça played as if it were in a neutral stadium. “It seemed like a final in which the tickets had been shared half and half”, lamented Xavi.
“It seemed like a final in which the tickets had been shared half and half”, lamented Xavi
board’s mistake
It was a circumstance that the players already noticed in the warm-up. The head of the team hopes to receive an explanation from the board in light of the evidence “that it was a clear miscalculation, this cannot happen to us.” Someone guaranteed that they would inform him of what had happened. “But this is no excuse”, he wanted to underline, just as he wanted to underline that he has no doubts about the game model and that “we are on the right track”. Not exempt from bumps like the one suffered against Eintracht.
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Xavi considered that Barça had control of the match and did not know how to take advantage of that control to create chances. Instead, he was also unable to minimize turnovers and avoid the devastating counterattack that he had already shown last week in Germany.
“We let them run and they go on the counterattack like few other teams I’ve seen in my life,” said Xavi, although the debacle began with Eric’s penalty on Lindstrom. “The second goal is another loss that should not have occurred, of what we had warned about, and the third is a play in which they manage to turn the game,” he described. His conclusion was that the outcome had been more to the detriment of Barça than to the merit of Eintracht.