Hansi Flick pulled off more football wizardry in Barcelona 's 5-1 thrashing of Villarreal on Sunday. Like all good magicians, though, it's time for him to swirl his cape, twirl his moustache, look the audience straight in the eye and announce, "And now for my next trick!" The German coach's Sunday sorcery was a devastating performance in which his team could easily have scored five or six more, against a difficult rival, using three more youngsters in the Barça lineup who, between them, had a mere five LaLiga starts for the club: Gerard Martín (2), Sergi Domínguez (1) and Pablo Torre (2). Barcelona shrugged off their injury crisis, their tiredness having played -- and been beaten -- with ten men at AS Monaco in the Champions League on Thursday, plus the juvenile nature of their XI (never mind the fact that Villarreal attacked them with venom and could themselves have scored five or six times) yet won in stunning fashion.
In the short time since joining, Flick has put huge faith in a raft of junior and completely inexperienced players from his youth system and produced winning, high-scoring, top-of-the-league football, which makes him, if you pardon the comparison, Barcelona's version of David Blaine or David Copperfield. The reason he urgently needs to top those feats and conjure up something even more special is the horrible injury to his first-choice goalkeeper Marc-André ter Stegen . The Germany international had made three fantastic saves to keep rampant Villarrea.