The Champions League returns to the Bernabéu today with the scent of a big night (9:00 p.m., Movistar), with the last finalist of the tournament on the poster, and finds Real Madrid still lost in its musings. The team is facing the first big push of the season, with two heavyweight visits, this one from Borussia Dortmund, leader of the European tournament, and on Saturday, that of Barça, which is flying at the helm of the League. It’s already October and Carlo Ancelotti is still trying to adjust what has gone wrong since his team defeated the Germans at Wembley on June 1, celebrated the 15th European Cup, fired Toni Kroos, received Kylian Mbappé and left vacation.
Something jumped in the gears then, and the Italian has been aiming for collective functioning, harmony, balance since the beginning of the season. And like the classics, he is convinced that this is fixed from back to front: “We are focused on defending better, which I think is the key to this season. We have to defend better, as we did very very well last year,” he said yesterday.
He believes that the gregarious soul that last year allowed them to overcome a desperate succession of injuries has evaporated. They have lost something like the sense that helps the coordination of flocks of starlings, which manage to turn harmoniously almost instantaneously. “I think the team is less solid in this sense. We are working on this, on giving more strength to the team,” explained the Italian. “We have to work more compactly as a team. “Sometimes you have the idea of pressing up, but the automation still doesn’t work.”
From his position, Thibaut Courtois has a privileged view of the phenomenon: “I think that sometimes it is communication, when to press and how, that the eleven have to do it together. If one leaves early and another does not follow, gaps are created and there many teams can hurt you. And that is what we try to correct in training.”
In addition to the need for tactical work in Valdebebas, Ancelotti pointed to another cause of the imbalances: “It is also a problem of physical condition, that everyone is still not at 100%”, an argument that he already referred to last Friday and that They share in the club offices.
But another factor can also be pointed out that partly has to do with attitude. It is the first time in the last nine seasons in which Madrid conducts itself with less intensity than the average of the League teams, as indicated by the data collected by Hudl Statsbomb. When Madrid’s rivals receive a pass, only 19% of the time are they pressured in the following two seconds, when the championship average is 21%. That was precisely the proportion of rival actions that Madrid put pressure on in the previous two seasons, when it remained slightly above the League average.
This is the structural problem that focuses the attention of Ancelotti, who remains confident that the goals will come to him almost automatically thanks to the pieces he has up front. He even takes Mbappé out of the defensive mix: “I prefer him to score goals rather than press,” the Italian explained yesterday. “I ask Mbappé exactly what Karim did: position himself well to be ready when we recover the ball to make a quick transition.”
He takes that for granted. What he believes is urgent, given the harshness of the visits from Dortmund and Barça, is to recover the team spirit.