“We all arrived alive. [a Navidad]. Me, but also you.” Carlo Ancelotti said goodbye to the press on December 22 with a mischievous smile after the convincing victory against Sevilla, a good afternoon for Madrid that seemed to underpin their improvement after a start to the season with too many doubts and several wallows. However, three weeks after that scene of relief for the Italian, and with the heavy burden of Barcelona’s review in the Super Cup final, the sharpest, driest and most serious Carlo Ancelotti emerged with the media bench. An unknown version in Valdebebas in a technician envied by the vast majority of his colleagues for his ability to handle the hassle of press conferences.
Is it a problem of attitude, that some player has saved a career in defense to help his teammates, or is it a football problem? They asked him about the setback in Saudi Arabia and in the run-up to hosting Celta in the Cup. single match (9:30 p.m., La1). “This is a press conference and not a debate. We do, and have done, the debate and discussion with the coaching staff and the players. Opening a debate here is not the most appropriate thing to do,” he answered bluntly about one of the open questions in the white team. Do you need any reinforcement in January? They asked him at another point in the appearance. “I won’t answer you,” he settled in the middle of the winter transfer market. “Talking here about what I deal with the club doesn’t seem right to me,” he had said before about possible hirings, always very serious.
The tone and serious gesture of Carletto, who until now had easily addressed or avoided the thorniest issues, only confirmed the internal concern generated by the state of Madrid after five months of improving football, two Barça goals and recurring problems. in the defensive framework. “This is not a time for words. “It’s time for things,” reacted a club source, who complained about the “merciless” criticism from the press. On Monday, the entity’s sports management had insisted that they maintained their confidence in the coach.
The workforce “is not always able to show commitment”
It is not difficult to follow Madrid’s trajectory on this rocky course through Ancelotti’s words. He issued two public alerts about his team’s performance in August, after the draws in Mallorca and Las Palmas; He urgently appealed to “sacrifice, concentration and collective work” after the 0-4 of the classic and the 1-3 of Milan; He tried to reduce the environmental tension by joking with journalists before traveling to Girona; and two weeks later he admitted that in the previous months he had been “more nervous than normal” and that in August he found it “difficult to recover his attitude.” And now, with the paste of Barcelona’s 5-2 score still being digested, he showed a sharp side that there had been no news about, at least, in this second stage at the Bernabéu. “I’m not the best, but I’m not the dumbest either,” he responded when asked if there had been any criticism that had bothered him.
The white coach recognized that his squad “is not always capable of showing commitment”, a concept that he has referred to in recent months in a harsh manner to explain why Madrid is not gaining height. “Commitment, together with quality, gives you success. You can have an individual commitment, but you don’t always have a commitment all together. It’s what we’ve been missing. I don’t think the player enters the field without commitment. He wants to do it, but the most important thing is to put this individual commitment together. “It’s what we lacked against Barcelona,” argued the Italian, head of a squad that has many stars at the top and that tends, as he warned at the beginning of the campaign, toward imbalance. In any case, in Barça’s defeat, he assured, his team failed “in all lines at a defensive level.”
In Jeddah, with the score 5-2 hot, Ancelotti did not want to single out Lucas Vázquez and Tchouameni, two of the most notable players in a defense that has been severely damaged by injuries and the club’s insistence, to date, on not going to the market. But this Wednesday he did protect the Frenchman again. “I remain convinced that he has done well [como central]. The data speaks. I keep in mind that it is not your ideal position. When Alaba returns [no convocado contra el Celta, aunque podría tener minutos ante Las Palmas 13 meses después]”We will not have the emergency and it will return to its place, as a pivot,” he stressed. Against Celta, he announced Lunin between the sticks (Courtois is resting) and said that he will field “the best possible team.”
