Even though Real Madrid has a good possibility to reduce the points gap with Barcelona in El Clasico match, however we can never guarantee victory at Camp Nou. You just need to be aware that Barcelona are very strong at home, but things can change when the team is not at their best.
As long as real madrid could win the game and cutting three points are good enough for madrid. Some main players were getting injured. That gives advantages to the real madrid over barcelona even though if the game will be played at barcelona's home but don't underestimated real madrid at this moment.
Barcelona are not missing defenders, but they only have problems with midfielders and strikers. So I still consider them pretty strong on defense, but maybe a bit weak on offense.
Missing dembele and pedrid have become a serious problem for barcelona. The secondary players didn't have capability to be used as replacements for those pedri and dembele. You can see the result between barcelona against almeria. After barcelona was losing against manchester united and the same thing happened when barcelona faced almeria in the continuation of la liga. You shall also aware if barcelona had very big ball possessions which was even more than 70% ball possession but barcelona has only 1 shot on target compared with almeria which is very low ball possession but it has more shots on target. That means the impact contributed by dembele and pedri were so big for the club.