Without going home after a chaotic trip to Pamplona that has inflamed spirits, Real Madrid has been forced to change its agenda on the fly to prepare the defense of the Spanish Super Cup that it won last year in Saudi Arabia under conditions that they are far from ideal. The whites, unable to return to the Spanish capital due to the ravages of the storm, will fly directly to Malaga this Monday to begin exercising there with their sights set on the semifinal that will face them on Thursday with Athletic at the La Rosaleda stadium. A decision that was adopted after the authorities confirmed that they could not land this Sunday at the Madrid-Barajas Adolfo Suárez Airport, so they will have to spend the night for the third consecutive night in a hotel in the Navarrese city.
Zinedine Zidane’s team will therefore spend between six and nine days away from Madrid, depending on whether or not it qualifies for the final that will host the La Cartuja stadium on Sunday, after taking off from Barajas on Friday for almost four hours after what was scheduled to face the duel against Osasuna in El Sadar, which was marked by the storm Filomena and the anger of the club chaired by Florentino Pérez with LaLiga, understanding that it would have been better to vary the time of the litigation to avoid the snowfall and even postpone it.
“We did what we could in the field. I did not see a great football game on the field, but it is like that. It has altered everything. Playing like this is very complicated, but they have made the decision to play, we have played and it is what has been seen. It shouldn’t have been played, ”said Zidane, visibly outraged. Thibaut Courtois went even further and accused LaLiga of treating them as “puppets”. “We have been able to play, but from LaLiga it is a little regrettable what they have done to us,” said the Belgian. Toni Kroos, who made 300 appearances for Real Madrid in the rojillo fiefdom, avoided, on the contrary, diverting attention from the bad match that his team completed against Osasuna. “There are no excuses for the state of the field”, said the Teuton, who recognized that they lacked imagination to dismantle the rival.
Reductionist argument
Of course, spending more than three hours on a plane on the ground does not favor anyone’s concentration before facing a lawsuit. Nor does it help to deploy a high-flying football to run into a lawn that hindered the movement of the ball and caused risks in the supports, despite the commendable work of the Osasuna workers to keep it in the best possible condition. But attributing the Real Madrid jam against the Navarrese team to grass is a reductionist argument.
The current league champion he only shot once on goal, despite exceeding 70% of possession. And that on the green was his theoretical trident of bells. Hazard, Asensio and Benzema raised, with the 66 in which they shared space in El Sadar, to 268 the total number of minutes they have played together since the Belgian’s landing in Chamartín. But Real Madrid stayed at zero. Something that, on the other hand, happens more and more frequently. The whites barely stopped scoring in 9 of the 149 games that made up the first stage on their Zidane bench. Since the Marseillais returned in March 2019, they have added 15 in the 86 crashes they have faced.
The extinction of the BBC, which sealed 442 of the 784 goals that Real Madrid scored in the period between the signing of Gareth Bale in the summer of 2013 and the departure of Cristiano Ronaldo after the final in Kiev in 2018, continues to take its toll to the whites, what They have not managed to repair the immense gap left by the Portuguese leak, weighed down by injuries such as those that kept Hazard and Asensio in dry dock for much of last season and failed signings such as Luka Jovic’s.
With Benzema as the only survivor of that historic forward, Real Madrid will try to forget in Malaga the odyssey of this weekend, which began when the plane that was taking him to Pamplona took off shortly before 11pm on Friday. as explained by the Minister of Transport, Mobility and Urban Agenda, José Luis Ábalos, because the pilot “understood that the safety conditions were in place to proceed to take off” at a time when Barajas Airport was “in transition” towards the suspension of operations, and will end when it lands in the Andalusian city. Lifting the Super Cup would be a good cure for the wound, but the path passes through sports self-diagnosis and not through institutional reproaches, as much as these may have some foundation.
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