#title-race

#title-race

It's hard to maintain consistency when you make individual errors. It was our worst match of the season,

Barca have endured a difficult period in recent weeks, suffering league defeats to Sevilla and Real Madrid and being held to a 3-3 draw by Club Brugge in the Champions League. But on Sunday, they pulled within three points of Madrid at the top of LaLiga by edging a six-goal thriller at the Estadio Abanca-Balaidos, where Lewandowski scored a hat-trick.

We had a setback last year, no Champions League, and we sat down as a group at the end of last season and had an honest conversation between ourselves,

No prizes for guessing this one. Our pick for game of the weekend could not be anywhere else as the Premiership's top two face off at Tynecastle with a five-point gap wedged between them. Chat of a title challenge from Hearts is becoming more serious by the week, while Celtic appear to be on the verge of a crisis. Defeat for Brendan Rodgers' men, who beat Sturm Graz on Thursday, would stretch open a scarcely-believable eight-point advantage for Derek McInnes' side.

We moved the ball well and created situations in the first half, but were too busy trying to be pretty, and basically we created their goal for them. There was more energy after the break, but not enough. So congratulations to Torino, but the fact is we did it all ourselves today. I had said at the start of the season that I know football well, so I assumed these were perfectly normal things to say. We are building something new here. We've got to work well, and our season will depend on how the new arrivals grow and improve. We have a game every three days, we do not have time to work in training, so we've got to improve every time and have patience before seeing those improvements.

On a recent weekend in the Dutch Eredivisie, the two main protagonists in last season's stunning title fight - PSV Eindhoven and Ajax - both surprisingly dropped points against newly promoted sides, FC Volendam and Telstar. The former is a real yo-yo club that got relegated two seasons ago after shipping 88 goals, whilst the latter's stunning victory in Eindhoven was their first after a 47-year absence from the top division.