"Barcelona snatched him from the jaws of Real Madrid!": who is Hafez Ghariba, who has entered Flick's sphere of interest?

Hansi Flick appears to have found his tactical fix for Barcelona's battered defensive line. Andreas Christensen faces more than a month and a half on the sidelines after picking up an injury against Sevilla.

According to Spanish newspaper "Sport", young Ghanaian defender Hafiz Gariba, 19, has emerged as a genuine candidate to bolster the first team. He has dazzled for Barcelona's reserve side and kept a clean sheet in each of the first three league matches.

How did Barcelona snatch the gem from the jaws of Real Madrid?

Gariba's arrival reads like a film script. He started out in the destitute alleys of Accra before the "Marcet" foundation discovered him. Bureaucratic hurdles blocked him from joining the senior side the moment he landed in Spain, so he turned out for "Codolar" in the Catalan fourth division.

Modest as the level was, his phenomenal displays sent shockwaves through the scouts of both giants. Real Madrid and Barcelona dispatched their scouts to watch Gariba and lodged official offers to sign him at exactly the same time, according to "Sport".

Barcelona's board settled the battle cleverly. Academy chief Toni Hernandez moved fast, sold the player on the Catalan project and completed the switch to "La Masia". Real Madrid's hierarchy lost the bet.

The perfect tactic for Flick's style

"Sport" noted that Gariba shrugged off the rotten luck that dogged him early in the summer, when a sudden virus cost him a place in the England camp. He recovered his sharpness to become an untouchable pillar of the reserve lineup.

His form caught Flick's eye. The German coach knows the player's qualities inside out. Flick's style leans on aggressive high defending, and demands defenders with the raw pace to sprint back and mop up the spaces behind, precisely Gariba's standout trait.

With a fixture pile-up and mounting injuries, Gariba's stock is soaring. He could yet prove the trump card in the first team, letting Barcelona repay their fans with a signing time has revealed as a masterstroke at the expense of their fiercest rivals.

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