The Barcelona team is reducing its reliance on Messi by this I mean that Griezmann was not in the form before, if Messi had not scored or assisted, it would have been very difficult to win against the small team of Barcelona. But now Barcelona seems stable enough. De Jong, Pedri, Griezmann are all able to score now.
But clearly from the highlights, Messi was still involved in everything! Which is nice to see of course but it keeps me worried that the successor is yet to be identified. I mean, that magic feet and brain my god.
Still, they did really well to come back from 2 goals down though but I wonder if the extra 30 minutes will not be helpful for them to stay fresh.
I have said the same thing about real Madrid before and I will say it for Barcelona as well, you do not replace these players. Madrid had trouble finding "another ronaldo" and they just sold him because 100 millio for 34 year old player was an awesome offer and they imagined if they could pay 100 million for another young star they could have replaced him but we all know how they failed, you can't replace a ronaldo.
Same goes for Messi and Barcelona, you can't replace messi because he is messi, there will never be another messi (well not any time soon at least) and his peak was something football has never seen before. So at the end of the day what can you do if you can't replace messi? You replace his average, which means if you have lets say a bad right back and no messi, you do great right back and replace messi with another great player (not at messi level) that way you decrease average in one position but you increase it on another and try to cover the difference, do this in 4-5 positions and you will be good.