It wasn't in San Mamés that the Spanish Super Cup slipped out of FC Barcelona’s hands. The copa was lost long before Aritz Aduriz’ hat trick, even before Mikel San José’s first goal. It was out of blaugranas’ hands three days earlier, 4,902.2 km away, in Tbilisi.

It’s as simple as that. Barcelona were comfortably winning 4-1 against Sevilla in the European Super Cup, but then managed to lose the lead and ended up going to extra time, where they finally beat the Europa League champions with a late goal from Pedro.

If Barça had managed to hold on to the lead, the match would’ve ended in 90 minutes, and we’d probably have seen Luis Enrique put out a more competitive lineup in the first leg of the Spanish Super Cup.

That didn’t happen.

Ter Stegen, Alves, Mascherano (switching from center back to defensive midfielder), Messi and Suárez were the players who started against Sevilla and against Athletic in the first leg. Piqué, Mathieu, Busquets, Iniesta and Rakitic were rested. In the end Barcelona ended up fielding a starting XI that looked like this: Ter Stegen; Alves, Bartra, Vermaelen, Adriano; Sergi Roberto, Mascherano, Rafinha; Messi, Suárez and Pedro.

Luis Enrique, knowing that Barça were in preseason mode, opted for this peculiar lineup, instead of repeating the same XI with just less than three days rest and plane flights from Georgia to Barcelona and from Barcelona to Bilbao.

Needless to say that the first leg was catastrophic for Barcelona and basically ended any hope of the blaugrana club repeating a double sextuple. Sergi Roberto and Rafinha played in front of Mascherano and were horrible at it. There’s no other way to put it.

Athletic decided to press high up the pitch and neither of the two Barcelona youngsters showed any signs of being able to deal with such pressure. Both of them lost the ball too easily and gave passes away to the Athletic players almost as if without a care in the world. It was painful to watch.

On top of that you add the fact that Mascherano was the defensive midfielder instead of Busquets and you had a recipe for disaster. The Argentinian shines in that role in teams that tend to defend deep and where his only responsibility, or main one, is to defend. When he plays in that position, for a team like Barcelona, that wants and needs to have the ball, and the other team is pressing high up the pitch aggressively, he looks really out of place. He doesn’t have the technique required, like Busquets does, to be able to surpass that pressing. So in the end you had an unknown midfield at San Mamés that was completely outplayed by the opposition.

As if that wasn’t bad enough, the usual left side of the pitch for Barça consists of Jordi Alba and Neymar. Both were injured/sick and their replacements were Adriano and Pedro. Another reason why it was so hard for the blaugrana to play the ball cleanly out of the back and ended up giving the ball away so easily in dangerous places. Plus, Alves, who played incredibly well during the second half of last season, played horrendously. He allowed the cross that Aduriz ended up heading over Mascherano. He basically assisted Aduriz in the third goal of the match and he committed the foul inside the area that lead to Aduriz completing his hat trick via the penalty spot. It was a complete and utter nightmare for the Brazilian.

I would talk extensively about the second leg, but it would be a waste of time. Coming back from a 4-0 deficit and this stage of preseason, against a club well organized like Athletic, was a pretty damn hard mission. Barcelona played really well during the first half and created numerous opportunities with Piqué even hitting the crossbar. The first and only goal came a minute before the end of the half thanks to a great team play by Mascherano, Rakitic, Suárez and Messi. Barça had emptied their fuel tank during the first 45 minutes, which at this moment in time didn’t have that much fuel to begin with, so the second half was just a formality. Piqué got sent off 13 minutes into the second half and the rest was history. Athletic Bilbao took care of the tie during the first leg and that was it.

Luis Enrique should look at this as a learning experience that showed him the importance of having a good first leg in a cup tie, because if you end up with an adverse result, then it’s really, really, really hard to come back from it. This was a completely different scenario for the blaugrana because during the 2014/2015 season they won all the first legs in the Champions League (vs Manchester City, PSG and Bayern) and in the Copa del Rey (vs Huesca, Elche, Atlético Madrid and Villarreal).