the brick academy

Not sure if this man will ever leave the Academy. And more importantly, I have no idea how he even managed to become a professional goalkeeper. 

He’s been so bad and prone to mistakes for Chelsea, that I don’t know whether he can gather the confidence to have enough belief in himself to actually know how to be a decent keeper. 

For now, he’s going to be here for a while as there’s no sign of improvement. No light at the end of the tunnel, and he needs to learn to dive just as the shot is being taken, and not after the ball is in the back of the net. 

You can sometimes chart the very moment where someone became a brick. Not always, but there are times. For Alba, you just have to cast your minds back to 2019, on that fateful night where a lot of Barcelona fans gave up on the club (Core). 

Alba was one of the worst players on that pitch and it was a game in which he never recovered from mentally. And since then, after scoring that quality goal in the Euro 2012 final, he’s pretty much useless and no longer offers the great runs and attacking options that he did at his peak. 

And when you lose it, you lose it. The mental side of the game is very important and once you lose that self-belief, you can no longer get it back. It’s gone forever. Which is why the best thing Barcelona could do, is to offload him and replace him immediately. 

As for Alba, I suppose for a mid-tier team he can still offer them something. But at the elite level for a club looking to win trophies, he’s not it. That time is gone.