When you witness such a lop-sided Clasico, the focus inevitably shifts to what went wrong for the loser. And make no mistake about it, plenty did go wrong for Real Madrid. We'll get to that but first, it's worth putting some of what Barcelona achieved Saturday into context. Hindsight is always 20/20 but you would have assumed that Lionel Messi would have been foaming at the mouth to get on the pitch from the very first minute. He hadn't played in nearly two months and, by all accounts, had worked well on his fitness over the international break. Then there's what happened the last time Messi was left out. You remember, don't you? The defeat at Real Sociedad, the sudden stomach ache, the supposed emergency talks... it nearly derailed Luis Enrique's tenure. Playing it safe would likely have meant playing him from the start. After all, Barca's next fixtures are a virtually meaningless UCL group game against Roma at the Camp Nou, the visit of Real Sociedad and another home date against third-tier Vilanovense. Should anything go wrong, you wouldn't really need him anyway for another couple of weeks. Instead Luis Enrique showed courage and character in putting him on the bench, bringing him on early in the second half. Barca had been flying without their best player and they would keep flying him without him, at least for a little while. Not only that, he also reworked his personnel. Instead of Munir or Sandro, Sergi Roberto became the third prong in attack with Neymar and Luis Suarez, while Andres Iniesta filled a play-making role on the center left. Barca were devastating -- the 4-0 win doesn't fully reflect their superiority on the day. Suarez and Neymar didn't just continue their scoring spree, they moved and created with a combination of selflessness and intelligence that was in stark contrast to what was happening on the opposite front. They were blue-collar superstars on the day while Iniesta turned back the clock, dispensing assists and magic at every turn. It's easy to point to Madrid's shortcomings, easier still to simply explain Barca's dominance through the lens of their individual talent. But that would also mean selling them short. This was a team performance made possible by Luis Enrique's scheme and the work done on the training pitch. With a six-point lead in La Liga, a return leg at the Camp Nou and a relatively soft fixture list for the next two months (the one exception, possibly, the trip to Valencia), Messi can now be eased back into a Barca side that appears to have banished the "Messi-dependent" tag once and for all. Many people to blame for Real Madrid's capitulation As for Real Madrid, where to begin? Maybe with the fact that there are no excuses. Of the 13 players who took the pitch, only two (Raphael Varane and James Rodriguez) were away on international duty. The rest had plenty of time to prepare for the game. If you don't buy the narrative in which president Florentino Perez is exerting undue influence on Rafa Benitez, a lot of the blame must then fall on the manager. Playing what my colleague Sid Lowe described as a 6-0-4 formation against this Barcelona side is like racing NASCAR without brakes while on drugs: you won't necessarily crash and be turned into a little puddle of oil, but the odds are stacked against you. If you leave four guys standing around up the pitch, force Toni Kroos and Luka Modric to drop deeper and deeper and give Ivan Rakitic and Iniesta all the time in the world to find Suarez and Neymar, you'll pay a hefty price. We've been here before. Other than Danilo (who was horrendous) at right-back, these are the same outfield players that Carlo Ancelotti had to deal with last year. He put them in a slightly more conventional 4-3-3 and somehow persuaded Kroos, Modric, James and Karim Benzema to sacrifice themselves for the cause. It worked for a while and then stopped working, mainly because footballers aren't machines and you can only expect attacking players to run themselves into the ground defensively for so long. But while it worked, it at least allowed Madrid to keep Bale and Ronaldo in the lineup even when they did little off the ball. Benitez has the same problem, only without Ancelotti's "horse-whisperer" ability to manage superstar egos, and his solution made things worse. There may be a parallel universe where Bale can play productively in the congested spaces patrolled by Sergio Busquets and Rakitic, but it's not this one. The moment James was moved out wide, he stopped tracking back, though he was less awful than the others on the ball. Out on the other flank, Ronaldo was even more isolated: he'd end up with fewer touches than Keylor Navas. And Benzema clearly wasn't ready, whatever the reason. It's hard to accept that Benitez didn't see this. He built his entire career on balance and tactical nous and we know that in previous games against opponents who didn't have an Iniesta or a Neymar, he often deployed Casemiro to protect the back four. Not in the Clasico. Not this time -- he played the big guns in positions where (you'd assume) Perez would play them in a game of FIFA 16. The premise was that Real Madrid needed to be more attacking, but you're not more attacking if your creators in midfield are pinned back by endless grunt work. And you're not more attacking if your stellar forward quartet rarely see a decent ball. Did Benitez play this line-up because he thought it would give Madrid the best possible chance of winning? Or did he do it because he thought it's what his boss wanted? That's the million dollar question. Liverpool were superb but why were Man City so bad? Once again, Jurgen Klopp was careful to dampen enthusiasm following Liverpool's 4-1 win at Manchester City. His message was basically "don't expect this every week." Not for now, at least. He's right. Liverpool were utterly devastating and could easily have doubled their score. The high- octane counter-pressing was straight out of the early Klopp playbook, the one with Robert Lewandowski, Shinji Kagawa and Kuba Blaszczykowski hunting down opponents and making them pay. And at the right times, we also saw the front men standing off their opponents, in part to recapture their breath, in part to suck them forward before battering them again with the press. Adam Lallana, James Milner and Philippe Coutinho in particular appear to have spent the break absorbing Klopp's concepts. But before we get carried away, we ought to point out that this was also the worst Manchester City performance in a long, long time. I don't know that a Vincent Kompany-Nicolas Otamendi partnership would have turned in a Keystone Kops routine like the one submitted by Eliaquim Mangala and Martin Demichelis. Yaya Toure probably had his worst half as a City player (and he's had a fair few off- days). And sure, they missed David Silva and Fernandinho (the latter only came on at half-time). Conventional wisdom says that when faced with the high press, you either play through it (if you have the personnel to do it, and maybe on the day City did not) or you hit it long, whether for a target man (which City don't have) or into space for your speedsters to latch on to (City do have those in the form of Jesus Navas, Kun Aguero and Raheem Sterling). But City did none of that and Manuel Pellegrini will want to figure out why it all fell apart. You can scapegoat Demichelis and Mangala all you like but the problems were elsewhere and they weren't just about personnel. Mancini's making real progress with Inter On the evidence of the past few Inter Milan games, Roberto Mancini gets it. He knows that performances matter more than results when it comes to assessing the health of your team and he didn't let the string of 1-0 victories fool him. The Inter boss has regularly changed scheme and personnel over the past month in an effort to find the right formula and he did it again on Sunday night against Frosinone. The scheme changed from 3-5-2 to 4-2-3-1. Out went Rodrigo Palacio, Gary Medel, Juan Jesus and Danilo D'Ambrosio; in came Adem Ljajic, Stevan Jovetic, Alex Telles and Jonathan Biabiany. In went four goals against Frosinone, with none conceded at the other end. It's baby steps, sure, but admittedly against a buccaneering Frosinone side who concede space, it looked as if things were clicking. Just as they had, with a different set-up in previous games. And still, Mancini changed things around. There are fewer question marks surrounding this Inter side than there were a month ago and that's a credit to the manager. The real test will come next Monday when they travel to the San Paolo to take on second-place Napoli. Leicester deserve to be leading the league Yep, Leicester City are top of the Premier League. Since April 1 they've played 25 games in all competitions, winning 17, drawing six and losing just two. Nobody has done better in England; in fact, across Europe, only Barcelona (2.38 points per game) have had a better run than the Foxes (2.28) during that period. I hope to get into this some more detail at some point, but what's been annoying is the absolute gob-smacking surprise expressed by some commentators. Leicester were very good even before their strong run at the end of last season: simply put, they had played much better than their results. Nigel Pearson left in the summer but he wasn't replaced by some schlub. The guy who took over, Claudio Ranieri, is a hugely experienced manager who, in his last Premier League season, finished second and came within a couple of bonehead decisions (by him) of reaching the Champions League final. Since then, he's had his lows: getting sacked by Valencia, failing to make an impact at Inter Milan (not that he's the only one to do so), failing to win any of his four games as manager of Greece. But he's also had undeniable highs: leading Parma to a great escape from relegation, taking over a newly promoted Juventus side and finishing third, coming within a whisker of winning the Double with Roma (in what would turn out to be Jose Mourinho's Treble-winning season, no less), winning promotion with Monaco and then finishing runner- up behind Paris St. Germain. Most importantly, Leicester got themselves a guy who is a pragmatist, someone who knows when not to mess with stuff that ain't broken and who knows how to fix stuff that is. Rather than overhauling Leicester, he tweaked them. And he's been rewarded by results. Celebrate Vardy, but also pre-Premier League football Speaking of Leicester, Jamie Vardy has scored in 10 consecutive games, equalling Ruud Van Nistelrooy's mark. Obviously, that's the Premier League record, not the English top-flight record. The guy who holds that mark, Jimmy Dunne, set it some 84 years ago for Sheffield United and it's simply a less sexy story to say that Vardy is chasing a record set by someone most have never heard of while playing for a club several magnitudes smaller than Manchester United. The Premier League loves to emphasize its "otherness" from what came before. (That's why, no doubt, many more people know that the Premier League's all-time goalscorer, with 260 goals, is Alan Shearer and fewer remember Jimmy Greaves, who notched 357.) But that doesn't mean the rest of us need to follow suit. There was football before the Premier League. And even the argument that the Premier League was somehow superior to what came before -- and I'm not sure it was, for a long time (Dunne's time, in fact) the English league was far and away the best in Europe, something that can't be said for its current incarnation -- doesn't quite hold water. It's not as if somebody flicked a switch in 1992. The Premier League too has evolved. By all means celebrate Vardy even if he doesn't break the record. But don't forget Dunne. Or Greaves. Or Dixie Dean and his 60 goals in 1927-28. Or Peter Shilton's 849 appearances in the English top flight. Violence still exists in modern football At times, particularly those who follow this sport through the lens of TV, can tend to think that there's a visceral, sometimes violent subtext that for better or worse is part of the game's history, at least in Europe. We were reminded of that this past weekend. A West Ham supporter was stabbed outside White Hart Lane, some 200 fans were arrested after vicious fighting before Bayern's game away to Schalke and, in Athens, the big derby between Panathinaikos and Olympiacos was called off after Alfred Finnbogason was hit by a flare and fans invaded the pitch. Let this serve as a reminder. There are many different reasons why we're drawn to the game. For many, there's a strong element of tribalism and for some, there's the allure of violence, especially the kind which they believe they can get away with. The antiseptic corporate veneer that has descended on this game hasn't changed that. Lukaku's form causes further insult to Chelsea Romelu Lukaku's two strikes in Everton's 4-0 hammering of Aston Villa launched the Toffees into seventh place and took his career total to 51 Premier League goals. It's telling to note the guys in the Premier League era who hit the half-century mark at a younger age: Robbie Fowler, Michael Owen, Cristiano Ronaldo and Wayne Rooney. Equally remarkable is the fact that this is Lukaku's fifth season in England but he made just one start (and eight appearances in total) during his first campaign back in 2011-12. It doesn't necessarily mean he'll hit the heights of the other four, of course, but it speaks to the fact that he's been productive as he's matured and that's a rarity for young center-forwards. There's so much focus on his size, which is understandable, but in fact his movement and awareness are what set him apart. Chelsea made his loan deal permanent back in the summer of 2014 when they acquired Diego Costa to be their main center-forward. Given that Costa has missed nearly a third of Chelsea's league starts as a result of injuries and suspensions and given the fact that his understudies (Didier Drogba, Radamel Falcao and Loic Remy) haven't exactly set the world alight, you wonder if maybe they wish they could have that one back. Scolari continues to rebuild his reputation It's not a bad way to bounce back. Five-hundred and one days after the darkest night of his career -- the 7-1 thumping at the hands of Germany in the World Cup semifinal -- Luiz Felipe Scolari made history. "Felipao" guided Guangzhou to the Asian Champions' League final. The Chinese champions beat the United Arab Emirates' Al Ahli 1-0 on aggregate and the previous month, he had won the Chinese title. It doesn't begin to wipe the memory of the darkest day in the history of the Selecao (and Scolari's role in it) but the victory makes him only the second manager ever, after Marcello Lippi, to win the World Cup as well as the Champions League or its equivalent in two different continents. Coquelin injury hurts Arsenal more than defeat Arsenal conceded one shot on goal and somehow contrived to lose 2-1 at West Bromwich Albion. When you lose in those circumstances -- a botched penalty, an own goal -- it's not the end of the world. But you do wonder about how Francis Coquelin's injury (he won't be back before January) will affect matters. And even more, you wonder how it's possible that a team like Arsenal find themselves so dependent on Coquelin, a guy who 12 months ago was, to most neutrals, an obscure jobber on loan at a second-tier side.
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