One of the issues that have become clear in the first three months of Madrid post-Toni Kroos is that the youngsters in the midfield have not yet finished getting the hang of the team’s game. They still needed Luka Modric’s 39 years. The good thing for them was supposed to be that the classic, with Barcelona’s radical proposal to advance the defense to the midfield, prevented them from going through that drink from the start. All they could do was a brief scramble and send a long ball into space to try to connect with Vinicius and Mbappé. Even with a kick from his own field, as Valverde tried after half an hour and which the former PSG player did not take full advantage of. The night followed the expected script and the match was focused on those few meters where the white attackers moved to try to conquer the land that the Barça defenders left behind them. An equation, in principle favorable, that, however, they were never able to decipher. Two of the most accredited players on the planet to dominate space were trapped in the very fine and effective spider web of Cubarsi and Iñigo Martínez. The shipments and their movements never added up.
“The scoreboard does not reflect what happened. I liked the first part. We barely scored and their goals took all our energy away. Then it was another game because we took risks from behind,” analyzed the muffled and broken voice of Carlo Ancelottiwho called on his people not to lay down their arms despite the black horizon that has opened up for them. “There is nothing to throw away. It is not serious or correct. You have to be self-critical, but not throw everything away. Surely we are going to improve and we will not be far from the previous season, when we won the League and the Champions League,” assured the Italian. This was Madrid’s first defeat at home since April 8, 2023, a rather inconsequential one against Villarreal (2-3). Nothing to do with this 0-4 that inaugurates a major crisis at the Bernabéu.
Ancelotti, who a week ago recognized that round-trip matches are better for his team because he does not have the pieces to play in small spaces, still demanded calm in the first minutes, for his players to chew the ball a little more, the sight of his game so direct. But they didn’t pay much attention to him and, when they had to play from behind, the attempt almost always ended in fright for them. Lucas VazquezMendy and Rüdiger left behind several losses at the start.
Everything hung by a thread, a few centimeters between the culé rearguard and the two local stars. With no major threats yet for Lunin, the match led to a sequence of offsides. The white forwards were dropping like flies. Twelve in the entire match. The eight at halftime was the highest number for the meringues in a first half in the League since a match against Celta in 2013. Throughout the duel, Mbappé fell eight times and Viniciusthree. And when the Brazilian managed to avoid Hansi Flick’s plot, he sent her away after 20 minutes. Every white attack was a near. But there it stayed, on the border. Cubarsí and Iñigo Martínez kept Vini and Mbappé at bay in the face of general astonishment. Neither they nor the media shipments were able to pierce the rear.
The Bernabéu reached half-time with the feeling of a lost opportunity, of prey escaping alive from a battalion of shotguns, and the feeling became flesh after the break. Mendy did break the meccano of the white defense and Lewandowski did not forgive. And not upside down the next blink.
“The team competed for 60 minutes. We have to forget the last 30. I don’t regret anything about the approach. The idea was to press and we did it for an hour,” Ancelotti said in the midst of the storm.
