Match Preview : Red Star Belgrade VS Barça

A couple days on from the Catalan Derby, we’re back in action again. This time in the UEFA champions league. Live from Belgrade at 9pm local time, it’s Barca against Red Star Belgrade. We’ve had some very big games recently against opponents of an enormous stature. Bayern and Real Madrid. But tonight is a different type of game. It’s not going to be easy at all, the playing conditions will be difficult and we’ll be heading into a very hostile environment. So with that fully in mind, let’s jump straight into the review.

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A Quick Look at our opponents:

Red Star Belgrade, otherwise known as Crvena Zvezda, are our opponents for tonight. And as I touched on briefly above, they are going to offer us a completely different type of challenge to what we’ve had to put up with over the last few weeks. They’re a historic European team with a large and loyal fan base. Their stadium is always bouncing, especially on European nights like this, so it’s going to be a very difficult challenge for our young and exciting Barcelona team. With an intense atmosphere, we can’t afford to take this game lightly in any way. It’s going to be a battle out there later tonight in the freezing temperatures of Belgrade. They’re having a brilliant campaign in their respective league, unbeaten in their last 5 games, sitting comfortably at the top. With 43 goals scored and only 8 conceded, this team knows how to score and how to keep things tight at the back. So tonight isn’t going to be straight forward. Let’s see how we could lineup.

Predicted lineup:

Even though we played only a few days ago, I still expect Flick to go strong in this game. Maybe we’ll see one or two changes just to keep things fresh, but I really wouldn’t expect anything more than that. Casado was putting his body on the line a lot in the derby, so he may get a well deserved rest. Meaning Frenkie De Jong will most likely come into replace him. And I believe either Yamal or Raphinha will get rotated too. Ansu and Pau Víctor will be waiting in the wings for that. And also, I think we know for a fact that Kounde will come back in to the starting lineup after he was rested against Espanyol. Fort did a great job, but Kounde will definitely come back in.