Real Madrid UCL Group Stage 2019

So what is the reasoning that James was left out? I can understand him not starting against Atletico for Valverde for defensive stability, but his creativity and his will to play riskier passes was sorely missing today. How ironic that Modric and Kroos are considered playmakers when they rarely play a through ball and just pass sideways or backwards to statpad their passing completion rate. (Zidane should also be blamed for this IMO)

ZZ thought he had enough firepower and wanted to give the night off to injury-prone guys like James and Bale + call up some of the guys that usually don't make the squad.

Let's be real... we have plenty of firepower. And if we had started with the same intensity as the 2nd half, we win 4-0 or more.

Our guys just didn't take it seriously and Courtois let in 2 goals on 3 shots in the first half.

The big difference from say a Barca or our previous Madrid teams? Ter Stegen saves Barca a lot and Navas saved our arse often too. Courtois doesn't save us from shit. As an example, Dortmund would have scored 5 against Barca if Courtois was Barca's gk.

We had enough firepower to beat them, easily.

Seriously, Zizou NEEDS to let go of Vasquez. He ruins any attack we can do on the right. Hazard would eventually come good but Lucas is done. Give his minutes to Rodrygo or my boy Diaz. I get loyalty and all that but misplaced loyalty is a real thing out here.

French managers have this issue...  For example, Deschamps just loves Giroud and Sissoko.   France has a TON of talent.  These guys had no business being on the team for a while there.  Sissoko has earned it back.  But Giroud is a waste of space.  

You also had Rami getting called over Laporte and broken down Fekir over Lacazette.  

Zidane is like that too...  Literally every other wing player we have is far better than Lucas.  I can go down the list.  He doesn't even defend worth shit anymore.  I'd rather stick Modric or Valverde on the wing over Lucas.

This is the only part of ZZ that drive me crazy... Lucas.  I'm fine with everything else.

As an aside giroud does suck. I cant believe I had a back and forth with someone on this forum, trying to get them to see the light that giroud is not good at all.

I don't understand the point of playing Lucas Vasquez in 2019 when we have youngsters like Rodrygo and Vinicius marinating on the bench. I know for a fact they are not learning anything from Lucas, who is no longer improving as a player. I wonder if Zidane even thinks about this, the added value of helping those two or even just one integrates the starting eleven more often is much greater than playing Lucas Vasquez.

Anyway after the last 3 games it's disappointing to see a team that played such a high level together this Saturday play so miserably against a village club like Bruges. It makes me point to two things:
1) the overall attitude which suggests we did not respect them enough and they punished us for it.
2) the new players in the line up like Modric, and Lucas who are playing at an all time miserable level.

The saddest news of the day though, was to find out Courtois actually came out due to some bug. Some diarrhea thing? Fitting because he was shit. His aura in goal for us is just terrible, it doesn't even matter how God he is not think he is, his aura is shit and it's almost inviting goals in.

A couple of questions, first for Sport - what do u think about Zidane's emphasis on crossing so much to create chances? Reminds me of the old Man U when they were good, it was very effective, but as the others have said u dont have CR now.

Second question is why has Modric regressed so much? Its similar with Rakitic, I think they are similar age but shouldnt be to such a large extend and so quickly, I mean he's still the Ballon D'or holder ffs I guess they are losing the legs and motivation after the WC run, apart from the aging?

And Militao does look good from what I have seen, not that much, but so important for u guys since I guess he could be the eventually replacement for Ramos.

Rakitic is 31, Modric is 34. That's a pretty substantial difference, considering players tend to decline quite rapidly past 30. I think Modric has been slowing down since before the WC, but his decisive goal against Argentina gave him a massive boost in popularity that served as a distraction from it. The Ballon D'or is largely a popularity contest, anyway.

That old United that crossed (a lot) had Giggs and Beckham putting some pin point crosses to Yorke, Cole, Sheringham and Ole. When new players came in, SAF didn't emphasis much on crossing and focused more on playing the ball on the ground as strikers like Saha, Ruud, Rooney, Berbatov, Tevez and of course, Ronaldo benefited more from on the ground sort of football than constant crosses.

It doesn't mean they didn't cross, just not to the extent as Zidane insists on. And why do we continuously do that, well, I don't know. Personally think we have players that can easily play that on the ground sort of football but old habits die hard. Or maybe poor coaching. I don't know.

As for Modric, your question is obviously loaded as I know you would have preferred it to be Messi winning Ballon D'or but for the sake of sakeness, him winning actually is good for football. It's been a long time since a central midfielder won it and it showed, despite it was obviously a popularity thing, that you don't need to belt in 50+ goals a season to win an award.

That being said, he was regressing before the WC and this is just the natural regression of a once World Class footballer. Madrid, if they were their once ruthless self, would have given Modric the golden handshake and sign someone else but Zidane (and Perez it seems) has some serious misplaced loyalty going on.

All I know, Real Madrid as a club didn't stay on the top for all these decades being nice. It has always been a ruthless club, from management down to us fans. Modric and Lucas really should not be starting matches at this level but here we are.

@Barca learning, modric's regression is not sudden, same thing with the team. In the season of the third straight ucl, the team was knackered. Also he is in his mid 30s so it's to be expected

And agree with everything doc said as far as crossing and utd. Becks is the best crosser of the ball ever (imo) , so it was a valid tactic, a good strategy, and to man utd fans and non man utd haters, it was a thing of beauty, whipping those accurate crosses to the target. Giggs is no beckham, but he was much better a crosser than anyone we have. Then having yorke and Cole, or ruud in the box

Basically there was a strategy to it. With us, it seems more of a hopeful approach. Just keep crossing till something sticks. And yet we dont have the personnel for that. Then again, do we have the personnel to play the ball on the ground or make insiteful passes? No we dont. But hey that's he hole we love to dig for ourselves these days

I think we can Tito i.e can play more on the ground football. That usually comes with proper coaching unless you truly believe these guys simply cannot do that then I can't change your mind there.

We need to attack through the wings because fullback is the only place where we have athleticism.  Carvajal and Mendy have the athleticism to support the attack but still recover their positions when we lose the ball.

Modric is declining and Kroos is unathletic...  so we can't push them closer to the strikers to create through the middle in the attacking half.

That's the whole problem.  Due to lack of athleticism, we're forced to keep our CMs back.  They can't recover  defensively if they play too high.  So we're grossly outnumbered in the central part of the final 1/3.  Funny enough, Casemiro is the only CM we have that has the ability to recover.  But he's no magician with the ball.  He tries to attack though (he's brazilian; that's how they are).  And in any case, he's more of a threat on a cross as opposed to the ball at his feet.

We attack wide because the wings are the only attacking areas where we aren't outnumbered since we can bring our fullbacks into play.

ZZ's tactic is adapted to the strengths and weaknesses of his squad.  When Hazard finds some form, we may try a few more things.  But for now, he's not in shape. If Isco ever becomes Isco again, that will also open more options.

Regardless, our current midfield will always limit our options one way or another.

A problem that is easily rectified by utilising the transfer window.

Agreed Doc... I'm still a bit stunned that nothing happened at CM this summer.  Two summers in a row I'm stunned by this in fact.  It's so obvious.  And no, hoping kids step step up to take over the jobs isn't a viable strategy lol.  We need PROPER CMs with experience and work rate.

Winter window isn't going to solve it though. Nothing's available at CM.

It can be fixed in the transfer market so the blame lays solely on Zidane then, he should have made signings instead of acting like a bloke head with the Pogba thing

I asked the other day if there was a box to box player out there that we could sign mid season to help... Still not sure there is a clear candidate we can sign mid season with the kind of midfield presence we are looking for.

Benching Lucas immediately would be a start

Thank you for all the good replies, understood.

It is certainly a bit of a strange period for both our clubs it feels, when the management should be doing things better than what they are doing, leaving the league now pretty open. Intriguing ahead to see how it develops

@Nick... to be fair, the next best option was Ndombele. After that, not much out there. And given how meh Ndombele has looked to start the season with Spurs, I'm not sure that would have helped.

CM market is a desert right now. Not a whole lot of good ones.

sportsczy wrote:We need to attack through the wings because fullback is the only place where we have athleticism.  Carvajal and Mendy have the athleticism to support the attack but still recover their positions when we lose the ball.

Modric is declining and Kroos is unathletic...  so we can't push them closer to the strikers to create through the middle in the attacking half.

That's the whole problem.  Due to lack of athleticism, we're forced to keep our CMs back.  They can't recover  defensively if they play too high.  So we're grossly outnumbered in the central part of the final 1/3.  Funny enough, Casemiro is the only CM we have that has the ability to recover.  But he's no magician with the ball.  He tries to attack though (he's brazilian; that's how they are).  And in any case, he's more of a threat on a cross as opposed to the ball at his feet.

We attack wide because the wings are the only attacking areas where we aren't outnumbered since we can bring our fullbacks into play.

ZZ's tactic is adapted to the strengths and weaknesses of his squad.  When Hazard finds some form, we may try a few more things.  But for now, he's not in shape.  If Isco ever becomes Isco again, that will also open more options.

Regardless, our current midfield will always limit our options one way or another.

This is such rubbish all of it, la liga scrubs and other lesser teams can easily support their forwards, your not gonna tell me a lack of athleticism is stopping these guys from playing direct forward pass to benzema, all the players on the team regardless of line up aren't creating anything meaningful for benzema.

these guys rather back pass to opposition forwards than pass to our own cf, end of the day the players on the team are competing with benzema instead of supporting him  and it has been that way for years and everyone pretends like they can't see it.

Every team knows that carvajal positioning always forces varane to cover him and that forces Ramos to cover a big gap in the center, that zz fault and every team know Madrid want to go ti the wings and they block the wings and counter RM to death that zz fault, cr left the team and instead of moving forward, trying to build a proper way of playing just regressed further and further, to trash crossing and aimlessly running around like retards, can't string 2 passes together unless the team buys Pogba,Neymar and mbappe? smfh the stupidity.

Ndombele hasn't been meh, at all. He had a dream debut for Tottenham where he hustled the midfield, and even scored a goal. I can't stress enough how important he was in the following match against Man City, where they managed to salvage a draw against a substantially better team, largely thanks to his industriousness. Unfortunately, he missed the following two or three matches with a hamstring injury and looked a bit slower after he returned. I missed Tottenham's defeat to Bayern, but colleagues tell me him and Son were their only outstanding players on the night. I have no doubts that Ndombele would improve our team based on what I've seen from him, but that ship has likely sailed.

sportsczy wrote:@Nick... to be fair, the next best option was Ndombele. After that, not much out there. And given how meh Ndombele has looked to start the season with Spurs, I'm not sure that would have helped.

CM market is a desert right now. Not a whole lot of good ones.

this is not true though there were other players to go for like Fabian, Doucouré, the crotian mis from inter is really good, etc... There were midfielders out there that could have played for us

All Zidane knew was Pogba. This is his fault and now he makes it looks like he has no choice but to play a finished Modric

Brozovic and while he would have gladly played for us, Inter would have done everything in their power to not sell us him. But yeah, there were legit options out there but Zizou has a hard on for Pogba. A player whose club had zero obligation to sell or even negotiate.

I agree to a certain degree that Zidane is to blame for the state we're in right now. Him pursuing an unattainable target without a Plan B was a big and unforgivable mistake.

However, Real Madrid is not just Zidane, and I'm pretty sure there are many people working there, including the president himself, who knew from the get-go that Pogba was not coming and that Zidane's plan had too many holes in it.

So why did they waste the entire summer going after a player they knew fully well he was out of their price range from day one? Surely it wasn't just to placate Zidane with false promises.

I think they tried really hard to lower United's asking price and sign Pogba for Zidane up until the dying seconds of the transfer window. I also think they have given Zidane full control over transfers and team selection and that's why they didn't push for another signing themselves even though they must have known that they probably should.

This sounds great on paper (giving the manager full control, I mean), and it would work wonders if you had someone like Pep or Klopp in charge. But if your manager is tripping, maybe giving him full control is not the best thing to do.

You can't have it both ways. We complained for years that the club does not empower the manager and they did with Zidane.

Actually we know for a fact that the club wanted to sign other players like Van de Beek or Eriksen but Zidane torpedoed everything.

With power comes accountability. Zidane has 0 excuses here

i agree with @nick, i for one, have always been an advocate for letting the coach choose his squad and let chips fall where they may. its a two way process yes, but flo did everything by the book this time. in the past flo has signed guys regardless of whether the coach wants them or not and we complain that it messes the locker room. now its simple if we cannot sign who you want, its up to the coach to have plan b, c, and d

di maria for example wasn't our first choice, david silva was. and btw the shaky situation can't be just down to not getting pogba, he's good, but he's not maradona. any way let's ride this season out. but barca aren't in a rich vein of form either, i'm just hoping we don't waste opportunities to hold unto the league