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It's week one of the 2015-16 La Liga season, and it already looks like FC Barcelona have a problem heading into their opening match against Athletic Bilbao. Gerard Pique's four-match ban for insulting the linesman during the Supercopa de Espana has made an already perilous situation even worse for his club. While Barcelona should theoretically have 10 first-team defenders at their disposal, only four are currently available to manager Luis Enrique for Sunday's showdown. Even by the their typically tight standards when it comes to defensive numbers, that's cutting it close. Along with Pique, Jeremy Mathieu, who played 90 minutes home and away in league wins against Athletic last season, must serve a suspension due to the accumulation of yellow cards in the previous La Liga campaign. Brazilian right-back Douglas is a long-term injury absentee while more worryingly for the Catalans, neither Jordi Alba nor Adriano trained on Thursday morning, suggesting that chances of them being cleared to play are diminishing. Aleix Vidal, meanwhile, is unavailable until the new year. Unless things change between now and Sunday, Barcelona will have to improvise a combination at the back which is previously untested in competitive action. To state the obvious, that isn't ideal when taking on a team who just wrestled the Spanish Super Cup from their grasp, and doing it at the San Mames Stadium where that same side put four goals past the La Liga champions a week ago. Communication as well as intuition are perhaps more essential among defenders than any other position on the pitch, particularly when playing a high line like Barca, and those two aspects can only be advanced through shared playing time. That isn't yet the case for the combination of defenders that currently available to play on Sunday. The first and most likely option is to start Dani Alves, Javier Mascherano, Marc Bartra and Thomas Vermaelen together. Neither Alves nor Bartra have had the best preseason, with defensive mistakes against Sevilla and Athletic Club standing out, and both will need to raise their concentration levels and reaction times significantly to avoid repeat issues. Mascherano, newly elected one of the club captains and their best player on Monday, could have his work cut out. Not least if Vermaelen, who would only be making his second La Liga appearance ever, is indeed used at left-back. The Belgian hasn't played in the position regularly for some time now, and has never done so for the Barcelona first team. That adds an unwelcome air of unpredictability to the fold for his defensive teammates. While positioning him on the left flank could theoretically add some solidity against a rugged Athletic team, it would also mean a significant loss in width and attacking quality in comparison to the Catalan side's usual, more adventurous left-backs. That's a point worth noting for a club whose best method of defence tends to be the attack, and one that usually suffers when pushed back into their own half. An alternative could be to field the Belgium international as a third centre-back in a three-man defence, adopting the 3-3-3-1/3-5-2 hybrid system that Enrique deployed to some success in the similar circumstances of losing Alves against Paris Saint-Germain last September. One positive of that set-up is that it would leave one of the Barca defenders free to focus solely on Aritz Aduriz, who found it far too easy to cause problems in the two Supercopa games. It would also give Athletic's manager Ernesto Valverde something new to think about tactically, after he won the battle of the coaches in the first two matches between the sides this August. As always with Barcelona, aside from the few first-team players fit to play, the club's academy offers a wild-card solution. Left-back Alex Grimaldo is one of the biggest remaining talents in the Barca B team after their relegation to the Spanish third division. A player who made his debut in the Liga Adelante at just 15 years old, he has found first-team minutes impossible to come by despite new challenges clearly needed in order to keep the young player's development on track. The San Mames is not an easy environment for a 19-year-old to make his La Liga debut, but it wouldn't be the first time a Barcelona manager was brave with such decisions. Before they were elite-level players, former Barcelona manager Pep Guardiola gave the likes of Pedro Rodriguez and Sergio Busquets a chance to prove themselves against top sides. More recently, Sandro Ramirez and Munir El Haddadi were trusted during Luis Suarez's suspension last year and delivered positive results. Even if one of Adriano or Alba make a miraculous recovery, the need to cover for the possibility of mid-game injury relapses means Luis Enrique has a big call to make with his first squad of the league season. Get it right, and he may find a solution that proves useful further down the road this year, with the odds stacked against Barcelona having as easy a ride with injuries as they did last year. Get it wrong, and the Blaugrana's tough few weeks in cup competitions could grow into something bigger, the infamous "crisis" taking hold with particular ease in Catalonia.
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