Thibaut Courtois in the preseason match against Barcelona in the United States.Kevin Jairaj (USA TODAY Sports via Reuters Con)
State crisis at Real Madrid two days before the start of the League. Thibaut Courtois tore the anterior cruciate ligament in his left knee in training this Thursday, the club reported in a statement, and he will undergo surgery in the coming days. While waiting for the result of the operation, the recovery time for this type of injury is usually no less than six months. The serious mishap occurred in a fall during practice in Valdebebas, they detailed from the environment of the Belgian goalkeeper.
This is the most serious physical problem that the 31-and-a-half-year-old has suffered. In his medical history, the most important accident that appeared so far was the tear in a meniscus in the distant 2015-16 season, which kept him off the pitch for three months.
The injury jeopardizes Real Madrid’s plans for the season that starts this Saturday at San Mamés (9:30 p.m., Movistar). The second goalkeeper is Andriy Lunin, who after three consecutive seasons in the Whites’ first team has not finished offering all possible guarantees. A tireless worker in all the destinations he has gone through, even obsessive, his evolution at the Ciudad Deportiva after the first two seasons of loans (Leganés, Valladolid and Oviedo between 2018 and 2020) has not followed the expected evolution.
He barely has 17 games with Real Madrid, in which he has conceded 19 goals. Last season is when he accumulated more activity (12 duels) taking advantage, above all, of Courtois’ ciatalgia, with a balance of 13 goals against. There are 21 days left until the summer transfer market closes and Madrid can consider a suture operation in the goal. At the moment, against Athletic, Lunin is on stage, a serious, educated guy, often with few words, educated in the discipline of Eastern Europe. “I told him many times that at work not everything is quantity,” Pedro Jaro, who was a coach in the Ukrainian national team, commented to this newspaper a few months ago.
The accumulation of training sessions, however, has not brought him close enough to Courtois. It has been more than a decade since Madrid had a goal with such a big difference between the starter and the substitute. Since the days of Casillas and Adán, protagonists of a very stormy story, nothing to do with this one. In the preseason, the other two goalkeepers were the homegrown players Diego Piñeiro and Fran.
The Belgian’s misfortune further aggravates the difficulties suffered by Madrid when it comes to equipping itself with a protection shield. The eight goals conceded in the four pre-season games in the United States show the imbalances that need to be resolved at this point in the course, something that Carlo Ancelotti recognized, and that they represent the continuity of the problems suffered the previous season in containment tasks, with appeals continuous of the Italian technician to the concentration and the sacrifice. The improvement in Courtois’ performance after the World Cup helped alleviate that deficit back. Now, the change in the system (from the usual 4-3-3 to 4-4-2) that the squad has tested in recent weeks has also generated problems at the back.
Without Benzema and now without Courtois
The goal’s fall of two meters opens, at least for now, a new period in the white team, which has lost in just a few months the two key players who shot the League and the Champions League in 2021: Courtois, protagonist of a colossal performance in the final against Liverpool, and Benzema, who quietly left for Saudi Arabia after touching heaven in Paris, winning the Ballon d’Or and beginning a slow decline at the Bernabéu.
The enormous speed and volatility of football have transformed the Madrid of Courtois, Benzema and Vinicius in 2023, into a Madrid almost exclusively for young people, with the Brazilian at the head of a squad of newcomers that has Jude Bellingham (second most recent signing). expensive of the club, 103 million plus 30 in variables) as a new member. Kroos and Modric, more than ever, will act as old locker room senators despite the entity’s intention that their minutes dwindle.
While all the white stands meditated on the lack of a world-class center forward and continued (and suffered) with the infinite serial of Kylian Mbappé, misfortune devastated the goal with the serious injury of Thibaut Courtois, a position that hung in exclusive to him.
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2023-08-10 12:28:55
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