SHOULD I STAY OR SHOULD I GO?: THE ERNESTO VALVERDE SITUATION & THE BUILDING OF THE HOUSE OF CARDS EMPIRE PT.I (OF II)

           What will futbol historians think, when they look back and study Lionel Messi???
           They'll delight for days over the goals, the assists, the pure desire and hunger for greatness, the absolute ridiculousness of the goals the team scored together, the complete lack of selfishness, the vicious, clinical calculus of Messi's finishing...but then they'll ask WHY did he only win 4 UCL titles?
           How did that happen? How did Barcelona, who aren't (on the surface) the exact center of dysfunctional hell that is the Argentina national team and Argentine Federation, so why didn't they win more with the world's greatest player of all time, surrounded by top talent? Why didn't they win more?
                                    HOW COULD THEY NOT?????????

      When they look back, when they study Messi & this Barcelona phenomenon, a handful of names will be bandied about as reasons why they didn't: these will include Barca president Josep Maria Bartomeu, former Barca president and human shame Sandro Rosell and witless, listless "managers" like Tata Martino and the worst of all, Ernesto Valverde.

          The current idiocy of Ernesto Valverde cannot be dismissed merely as "this is what happens in futbol, players get injured," that is absolute crap. The injuries last year to Ousmane Dembele were both on Ernesto Valverde's mismanagement and disgust of rotation.                        New signing Ousmane Dembele hadn't played for a month and a half when he arrived at Barcelona from Dortmund, yet after only a small, electric cameo in his debut vs Espanyol, Valverde threw him on to the pitch from the start vs Juventus in the Champions League, and Ousmane lasted 70 minutes of rough and tumble futbol where he hit the deck a number of times and was entangled in Juventus players' challenges left and right, even as he was supposed to just be Messi's decoy in the match.
              No problem with this, maybe Ousmane appeared too soon,  but it was a big match in the season, so early.
              Suddenly, this is where the problems start: Valverde starts him only three days later against Getafe!!!!

I think we all, as Barcelona fans, looked like that right along with Ousmane right when this happened, September 2017 @ Getafe.

              Getafe?!?!?
              All it took was a back-heel and his hamstring was shredded to pieces....he was out for 3 months thanks to Valverde's mismanagement. Then to follow, he rushes Dembele back into the fray again in January, starting him immediately in matches upon his revival (remember this when we talk about Samuel Umtiti): in ten days, Dembele played: 19 minutes at first which makes sense, but then to utterly throw away any plan to gradually reintroduce him, Dembele starts and plays for 69 minutes only 3 days later; this is followed by 31 minutes some 4 days later and finally only 3 days later another 35 minutes in the rain against Sociedad for absolutely no reason, with no rest from any of these unnecessary matches after a 3 and a half month long hamstring injury?
               Not even to spare him from a Copa Del Rey match?
               This isn't a way to recover a player.

               Dembele spent another entire month out of the season from that decision to play him every match in such a tight 10 day period...on a hamstring or a muscle injury...this is an absolute shocker. And it created the whole "Dembele Is A Bust" stigma that has followed him on the heels of this season, of course until he absolutely ripped apart both Madrids, Tottenham and Atletico.
          Let's don't even worry about that, let's talk about the obvious ones: The nonstop playing of Gerard Pique, while he deals with multiple injuries; Pique has appeared 2,070 minutes this season at center back. On the other hand, Ivan Rakitic has a contract promised to him by Ernesto Valverde and Bartomeu, that he will play every single match he's available for. 

          Ivan Rakitic has already made 26 appearances for Barcelona this season, a truly staggering number and has played 2,017 minutes for Barcelona this season, a very unhealthy amount given the size of the squad and the options in midfield (let alone his nonstop exploits in the World Cup with Croatia, including 3 straight extra time knockout round matches he played every minute of and the post World Cup matches for Croatia)...it's an obvious thing, now....the contract does exist...and if that's what Barcelona is up to now with our contracts, we've got a whole novel-sized set of problems to go with these ones we're still going through. If that's what we're doing now, letting the business affairs of Bartomeu and his thugs take shape on our pitch, then we now know who actually runs the Barcelona squad.
          And it's not Ernesto Valverde.
          Sergi Busquets has also played and come back from injuries with too much speed, putting his club over his body apparently at all costs, which is why we love the guy, although it is what may damn and doom him. Our club needs Busquets just like it does Messi: without him we are an entirely different team....we must treat him with kid gloves and hold on to him for dear life. Busquets is one of the most durable players of all time, and it isn't always going to be that way, especially when he's constantly called upon to roam from one side of the midfield to the other to shut down passing lanes and go thrashing into players, with him now turning 31 in July.
         We've seen Busi attempting more sliding tackles in the last two seasons than I've seen him try in his entire career, something that was so glaring and troublesome for Barca die-hards (seeing Busquets slowly getting up, body quivering after a nasty, robust challenge or entanglement) that we've even seen Valverde being forced into resting Busquets (playing 1,963 total minutes, slightly less than his fellow veteran teammates).
        He's yet another player that Valverde, afraid of the media's destruction of his lethargic management, must play or fear the wrath and ire of the Spanish press.  In comparison to these veteran players, Ousmane Dembele has only played 1,368 minutes total so far, nearly half the amount of the Catalan axis of our team or Rakitic has been on the pitch.
       Also, Valverde has an obsession with running Lionel Messi and Luis Suarez into the ground, as well, playing them until their bodies rip up and tear and they can't play anymore. This happened last year, when after the Roma matches, we found out that both Suarez and Messi were suffering injuries that they hadn't had fully checked out due to the World Cup quests of both Uruguay and Argentina. along with the nonstop demands of their club.
        Suarez and Messi aren't these kinds of players...they will play and play and play until literally they can barely touch a ball...we saw Messi playing with his hamstring in half against Bayern Munich in the 2013 UCL Semifinals...we see Suarez routinely rushing himself into a bad patch of form and fitness (because the 30+ year old striker is a human being who gets tired, already lacks pace and a lackadaisical first touch at times) and Valverde letting it continue, allowing Suarez to keep playing on the pitch until what?
            Another injury, this time a long-term one finally sees him off?
            When all you had to do was say "hey Luis, we're resting you in the Copa Del Rey and in this last Champions League match, considering we've already qualified as group winners", but no...common sense doesn't reside here at FC Barcelona under this house of cards empire.
        Really, it was a great thing that Messi broke his forearm earlier this season; without it, we could be talking about Messi with a messed up calf-muscle injury or a hamstring by February, thanks to being played routinely every match, nonstop. And maybe Messi and Suarez, Pique, Busquets, Alba, maybe they ALL want to play this much.

Sergi Roberto has seen injury twice this season already, joining Rafinha, Cilessen, Pique, Messi, Suarez, Busquets, Coutinho, Arthur, Umtiti and Malcolm all seeing injuries. 

        Sure, they're professional athletes, of course they want to and they must play.
        But as a manager, you must manage, including the health and expectations of your best players. You need to save them from themselves....you need to take the bullets in the press and say "yup, we drew or lost today because I benched Messi and Suarez so we can have them in the UCL quarterfinals in top shape, instead of last year against Roma when I played them up top, isolated, alone and after an entire season where they were up top, alone, doing damage against everyone and everything"....well it takes a lot out of even the greatest players to go it alone all season, achieving record after record and staggering statistic by the match, such is the outrageous, otherworldly performance levels of Lionel Messi, Luis Suarez, Gerard Pique, Sergi Busquets, Jordi Alba among others.


        Then there is Samuel Umtiti: one of the best defenders in the world of any age, yet he happened to just turn 25, with so much future ahead of him...yet his career may be in absolute doubt as both his knee ligaments (from the injury before) and now his meniscus are both hanging by a thread, while he goes through recovery training after rehab training in Doha to try to recover without need for a surgery.
        He needs the surgery now and it's looking like he's going to get it, but this "should he get it or not get it" surgery saga masks over the real truth at the core of this issue: the first injury happened from Umtiti being rushed back into the beginning of the season with no rest or recovery time after a long World Cup, in which he already played that tournament through injury to avoid an earlier surgery on that same knee in the first place, a situation caused by us playing him every second the previous season (another Valverde mismanagement: never resting Umtiti last year...ever).
         See how these issues compound each other?? The dominoes will always fall when it comes to the human body....
          In the 8 appearances the French defender made for us this season, Umtiti had 3 yellow cards and a red card in a 5 match span right before his first injury and was also giving up penalties and bad fouls in Nations League play for France at the same time; Umtiti only had 7 yellow cards in the entire season previously, proving that all may not have been right with the French defender and now World Cup winner when this season began, obvious alarm bells ringing that both the Barcelona medical staff and Ernesto Valverde ignored.

         But the most harrowing part of all of this is what happened with the second injury.
         Sure, the first one is futbol, it happens, but this second one was an act of complete hubris it is still so shocking to me: after 3 and a half months out, due to a knee surgery....remember this isn't a broken thumb....this is a knee surgery, what does Valverde do? He doesn't even try to rotate him back gradually....due to the world media destroying Barcelona's porous defense in the wake of Umtiti's first spell out, Valverde felt he had to play Umtiti the second he could possibly throw him out there. So what team does he do this against? It's one thing to play a center back a full 90 minutes after 3 and a half months out with a knee injury, it's quite another to do it against the most physical front line in all of La Liga: Atletico Madrid with Griezmann and Diego Costa breathing down the throats of defenders across all of Europe, pressing and hunting, fouling and getting into the heads of defenders, with manager Diego Simeone wanting his forwards to be just as aggressive as their own defenders.

        So you play Umtiti a full 90 against that team???

COSTA: Ohh...Samuel you can get mad all you want but this is the last time you'll play this season

        I don't care about how good they are, I don't care about how much better we were defensively with him, I don't give a shit about the 1-1 draw, I don't give a damn about Atletico potentially taking top spot in La Liga from us in late November.
         WE SHOULDN'T CARE ABOUT LA LIGA THIS MUCH....
         .......all we care about is seeing the players we love achieving the dreams of their desires: victories, titles, championships and good times for all to be had, on the pitch and off of it. We want to see Lionel Messi dribbling Jerome Boateng into a pillar of salt in the UCL semifinals, not getting 4 passed Huesca and Levante every week and without getting through the UCL Round of 16 or Quarterfinals.....
            ....and this is the problem with Umtiti....we needed him more in February until June, not to rush back to prove to Atletico and the world media that we can play defense again.
         So, now we understand how Valverde has destroyed (at least) the 2018/2019 season for Samuel Umtiti and thanks to his mismanagement last year playing Umtiti nearly every single match without question, he nearly cost Umtiti a World Cup: a World Cup in which he scored in the semi-final and won the entire thing, being named in the team of the tournament as well. And he accomplished that with a screwed up knee he reluctantly didn't have surgery on, thanks to Valverde to begin with.
       And after that we don't try to rectify that injury?
       We don't force upon him a surgery and a rest period from July 2018 after the World Cup until right about now when he would be back, fresh and fit and ready for the business end, the important part of the season begins?
        No....Valverde and Bartomeu just sit...and sit...and cannot wait for the moment they can possibly throw Umtiti back on to the pitch, fit or not.