Easy game. Should win by at least 5-0. Lacoruna are crap

We need Pepe back asap. He is the general of our defense, it's lost without him

Seems ages since the derby I just hope we actually start showing improvements especially those players who have been in crap form so far

Carvajal rested the others all start

Better attitude from the players this game but Ronaldo gotta watch out his moaning to the reff might have worked before but they dont accept shite from him anymore. He is a red card waiting to happen these days

Marcelo and Bale have been great, the others have been excellent too but those two have so far stood out.

I dont like this 433 we find it hard to win the ball back because everyone are so spread out. Depor are finding it easy to bypass our midfield and get crosses into the box

We're so wasteful. Bale and Benz should've gotten goals. Ronaldo also, but that turned into a goal 2 seconds later.

yea, the formation causes too much space in the midfield.

depor can bypass the entire midfield and go straight to attacking madrid's defence

why does arbeloa seem to always be way up the pitch in the oppositions half when they are attacking the madrid goal? Its beyond me, the guy is 30 something years old and seems to be lacking experience and positional sense.

hopefully we'll see lucas silva.

Really should do better against Deportivo, but after last weeks horror show I'm happy with 3 points.
Didn't get to see too much of Silva, hope he gets some more minutes against Schalke.
Illara was really good today.

Second half summed up our last couple of games perfectly. No intensity, no fight, players standing around waiting for the ball to get to them, losing the ball regularly. God, I hope we were just saving ourselves for Schalke because the first half was pretty good from the players in terms of attitude

That bald guy is a pos, Marcelo nutmeggs him and he retaliates by injuring him. I swear to god if he misses the Schalke game and we have to play Coentrao who pretends to be injured until Marcelo gets injured and then suddenly returns without having trained with the team

Glad Pepe is back next game, not that the defenders did bad, in fact they did excellent but he would give the other players an earful if they didn't get back to defend, Varane and Nacho are too nice

We really really really need to improve if we are to beat Schalke. We are far from the Real Madrid we were when we won 22 games in a row. And fir crying out loud please just revert back to a 442

the midfield is crap.  They get bullied.  Atleti gave everyone the roadmap for us... pressure the midfielders and they'll turn the ball over and, on the attack, have people dive to the penalty spot area because the midfielders won't track them there.

We're going to have to win ugly.  Our athletic issues in the midfield are bare for the world to see now.  Kroos is tired and Illara/Khedira/whoever are not a threat with the ball.  All the teams need to do is pressure Kroos/Isco and our play is stunted.  The guys are also not athletic enough to transition from defense to offense quickly except Isco.

Very worrying.

BBC are left to create and score for themselves with Isco.  Going 4 against 7-8 most of the time.  We need another 2 players to support consistently.  That would be a fullback and another midfielder. Marcelo supports well, but he then exposes the defense since he's not good at tracking back. So Carlo forces him to pick his spots. Arbeloa is useless of course. One of Kroos or Illara MUST dive into the attack.

Both Kroos and Illarra are CDM for us. I doubt Carlo would ask Kroos to attack because everytime he looks at him he sees Xabi Alonso instead lmao and Illarra can't because he is not a CM.

Our problem is not the midfield its our lack of unity when pressing. There was a moment in the game when the only ones pressing the Depor defence were Ronaldo and Benzema and the others retreated, all this did was just waste their eneegy needlessly because Depor just passed the ball around them being 4 v 2 and all. Bale tracked back every now and again this game but thats not good enough. For a guy who has played LB his tracking back is dreadful. When we played a 442 Isco would help Marcelo and James Carvajal without having to force Kroos/Modric to get out of position to cover this allowed us to be very compact and win the ball back quickly whenever we lost it, case in point Liverpool. Nowadays any half decent team can pass around our pressing because our players are too spread out and leave sea of gaps between them, and with their lack of athleticism that you mentioned it obviously makes them look bad when it's the whole system that's wrong

This can only be rectified by going back to a 442 using the tactics we used at the start of the season but swap Bale for James and make him accept he will scarcely score and become a hardworker instead.

Also the same as last season when an underperforming Benzema hampered us and this season with an underperforming Bale being the sole cause of us losing games, Ronaldo in this form is holding us back too. He needs to sort out whatever shite is going through his head and get it together because we all know Carlo will never bench him and so we can just hope he starts improving soon

I agree and the midfield is still a big issue...  if they defend, they're not good at transitioning to the attack and the forwards are isolated.  If they attack, they can't recover fast enough so the defense is exposed.

A rock and a hard place.

So Carlo tests them on the attack to see if we can just overwhelm teams there and pin them low.  Well, Atleti found us out and put massive pressure on the midfielders and they crumbled.  So now every team is going to force our midfield to make plays.  Carlo is a pragmatist and eventually just makes both Illara and Kroos play low so that we don't concede at least.

Reminds me of the Khedira-Alonso days tbh except that Isco has 1000000x more work rate than Ozil ever did so it's not as horrible.

One the positive side... Bale is playing much better. Of course, he had nowhere to go but up But there are some who manage to not improve or become even more crap. At least he's not in that category.

Maybe there's hope yet.

Problem is that he's usually like this against fodder teams and then looks poor when the competition goes up other than the random goal.

Meh, Bale had a similar game a couple of weeks ago and then went back to shite. If the fans weren't on the players back today he would probably have continued his every man for himself approach. Just wait a couple of weeks and he will be back to the usual selfish Bale again

I agree with Hala. You pretty much said everything that needed to be said.

illara/khedira is so crap its not even funny anymore. players gets past him, cant tackle to save his live, has no presence whatsoever, even lower table teams dominate us.

cant wait for silva/modric to play with kroos, they cant be worse then these scrubs. even isco plays better then these two.

needs to be sold asap, might help us get some funds from ttheir transfers.