Barcelona has become the most fearsome team in attack. With their backs covered, the defense resolved with its semi-automatic offside – the one baptized as “Flick’s abyss” – and the players focused on recovering the ball in the final third, the Barça goals have not stopped. This season they have already scored 55 goals – 40 in the League and 15 in the Champions League -, most of them provided by their unstoppable trident: the young talent of Lamine Yamal (6 goals), the scoring experience of Robert Lewandowski (19) and the reborn Raphinha (12). Accompanied by a great version of Jules Koundé, who in Belgrade had a hat trick of assists, two of them in less than three minutes. In the Champions League, they are also the team with the most positive average goal difference (10) in the entire table. There was no mercy against Red Star. And the intensity of the match left Pau Cubarsí with 10 stitches on his face after a rival kick.
And five goals fell in Belgrade, the fifth time for Flick in the 16 games he has been on the culé bench. Xavi Hernández needed 143 games to score four hands. And they already had Lewandowski, who this year has control of the goal. In his career he has already scored 99 goals in the top continental competition and is placed in third place in history, one behind a hundred, a figure that only Cristiano Ronaldo (140) and Messi (129) have surpassed. “I didn’t know. I changed him before he succeeded, it’s my fault. It has been very good, but we have to think about the next games,” Flick shared. Although Barcelona, during the first half, was more erratic. A disconnection that Iñigo Martínez, MVP of the game in Belgrade, did not overlook: “We scored one and slowed down the pace, it shouldn’t happen. In the second half we concentrated, it was us and we scored the goals.”
Barcelona also lifted a heavy cross and won away from home in the Champions League again. Last season they got used to the opposite — defeats against Shakthar and Antwerp; draw against Naples—and this year they stumbled in Monaco. In Belgrade, in front of a stadium without Barça animation due to the sanction in Paris against PSG, history was reversed. “Three points is the most important thing. It is not easy to win away from home in this competition. We played well with the ball,” said Flick. The winning streak of the team led by the German is extended: seven consecutive games winning, with a total of 29 goals. In Europe, the third victory in a row, and they are already sixth in the standings.
