#360view: Zidane has proven ignorance is bliss at Madrid

Andy West 21:45 14/10/2016
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  • Zidane has been criticised in recent weeks.

    They say a week is a long time in politics and football and that old maxim is never truer than at Real Madrid, where fortunes fluctuate with the wind.

    Zinedine Zidane knows this very well. Having spent five years playing at the Bernabeu, during which time Vicente Del Bosque was sacked just after winning the league, the French legend understands the fickle nature of life at the Spanish giants better than most.

    So Zidane will not be too concerned by the fact that both his players and his managerial credentials have been heavily criticised in the last couple of weeks.

    True, the team has not been playing very well. Four consecutive draws – especially the limp performance against Eibar just before the international break – brought a record-breaking run of victories to a juddering end and once again reopened the debate over whether Zidane will prove to be a decent coach.

    But, even though he has been in charge for less than a year, Zidane has already been here before.

    Rewind to the end of February, and you may recall Zidane and his beaten players trudging off the Bernabeu turf with whistles in their ears after a tepid performance in a home loss to local rivals Atletico.

    Zidane was no good, the critics said. He was too passive, they complained. He had no tactical nous, they wailed.

    What happened next? Well, just a small matter of 16 consecutive victories in La Liga, including a Clasico triumph at bitter rivals Barcelona, and revenge against Atletico in the Champions League Final. Not bad for a rookie coach who had been written off.

    Fortunately, Zidane is mature and wise enough not to get carried away by the negative or positive judgments handed down upon his work.

    As he noted in his pre-match press conference for today’s trip to Real Betis, he did not start believing he was the best coach in the world when he won the Champions League in May, and neither is he going to allow the recent criticism get inside his head.

    That is the perfect attitude – the only possible attitude, in fact – for managing a club like Real Madrid, where every defeat or draw is a treated as a major calamity and every victory, however undeserved, is regarded as further proof of invincibility.

    Allowing yourself to become influenced by that kind of wild overreaction can only have one consequence: paranoid madness. So Zidane is steering the correct route straight down the middle, essentially ignoring whatever anyone says about him and getting on with his job.

    Nevertheless, Saturday’s game is a dangerous one for Zidane and his players – not because of how they might be judged, but because they need to prove to themselves, not to anyone else, that they can cope without the injured Luka Modric and Casemiro, whose absence has coincided with the downturn in results.

    Although others (we’re looking at you, Cristiano) might claim more attention, the missing midfield duo are absolutely fundamental to the team’s structure: Casemiro for protecting the back four, and Modric for linking defence with attack. Without them, Los Blancos have desperately struggled.

    As coach, Zidane is the man who has to find the answers and you can be sure that task – not the ‘pressure’ he is supposedly now under – is the main thing on his mind.

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