Before the Champions League quarter-final second leg won 4-1 against Barça last season, Luis Enrique had identified a weak point in Xavi Hernandez’s team which PSG knew how to exploit perfectly.
The third and final part of the documentary dedicated to Luis Enrique will be broadcast this Monday, October 14 in Spain on the Movistar Plus+ channel. The first two episodes have already been revealed and are causing a lot of talk on the other side of the Pyrenees, particularly in Barcelona since several sequences of the second episode were devoted to PSG’s Champions League quarter-final against Barça.
PSG lost 3-2 at the Parc des Princes in the first leg before winning 4-1 in the return in Barcelona and qualifying for the last four. Before the return match, Luis Enrique had asked his players to target Ronald Araujo, Barça’s Uruguayan central defender, very good in one-on-one situations, but not very comfortable with the ball.
Luis Enrique asked his players to press Araujo
“Araujo is a world-class player, but he has the most problems with the ball. Every time Araujo receives the ball, we have to put pressure on him and close his passing line”launched “Lucho” to his troops before the return match in Barcelona. A match whose turning point was precisely the expulsion of Araujo in the 29th minute of play, not on a bad restart from the Uruguayan, but on a ball behind his back perfectly exploited by Bradley Barcola and which pushed the Catalan defender to make a mistake and receive a red card.
For Luis Enrique, however, this expulsion had no impact on the outcome of the match. “They wouldn’t have beaten us, even with eleven or twelve”thus launched the Parisian coach in the documentary, believing that Xavi’s Barça was not a good team defensively and was only swinging, “like Eibar”. Critics who are making headlines in the Catalan press in recent days.
