Did you hear about the football manager who won five trophies in a calendar year but still managed to end it in danger of being fired?
Well, that might be harsh, but Zinedine Zidane knew what he was getting into when he took over at Real Madrid, and the French legend is on borrowed time after his team’s capitulation against Barcelona on Saturday.
It wasn’t the fact that Real lost the game that was so concerning, or even the scoreline: it was the way that they competed well in the first half but then totally collapsed after the break.
If Barca had been clearly superior throughout, it would have been easier to accept. “Well, they are just better than us,” could be the shrugged response from Madridistas.
But that wasn’t the case, because Real were the better team during the opening period, dominating possession and territory, and creating a handful of decent chances to take the lead including a header from Karim Benzema which hit the post and a tragicomic ‘airball’ mishit from Cristiano Ronaldo.
After the interval, however, there was only one team in it. The fact that Dani Carvajal was sent off is immaterial – it did not change the game, because Barca were already well on top by then and the right-back staying on the field wouldn’t have made much difference.
So what happened? The obvious observation is that two key Barcelona players, who had been kept quiet in the first half, were able to take over: Sergio Busquets and Lionel Messi.
In the opening period, Busquets had been man marked by Toni Kroos, who was playing further forward than usual thanks to the inclusion of Mateo Kovacic, whose two-man tag team with Casemiro on Messi worked pretty well (although the Argentine did still create two chances for Paulinho).
From the 46th minute onwards, though, it was as though two completely different teams were playing and suddenly Busquets and Messi were granted the freedom of the immaculate Bernabeu turf, with the result that Busquets sprang the move for the first goal, Messi created the chance for Luis Suarez that eventually led to the second, and it could have been a lot more as the Blaugrana found gaps with alarming ease every time they came forward.
Suarez!! What a beautiful Barcelona goal pic.twitter.com/b3WrTZZiFS
— True Soccer Life (@TrueSccrLife) December 23, 2017
Why there was such a major change to the pattern of the game is hard to fathom. Were Kroos, Kovacic and Casemiro tired out by their first half exertions? Did Barca make tweaks – like playing Messi deeper and Andres Iniesta more centrally – to affect the balance of play? Or was it just one of those things that can happen without anybody knowing why?
We can speculate, but Zidane had to do more than speculate: he had to notice, react, and change. But he didn’t. Throughout the entire 45 minutes his team were dominated, with the fact that even Aleix Vidal managed to score – his first league goal since February and first ever for Barca away from home – serving to really rub in just how much better the visitors had become while the home team failed to respond.
Real, though, are not really that much worse than Barca – or, at least, they shouldn’t be. We saw that towards the end of last season, when they deservedly won La Liga and then thrashed Juventus 4-1 in the Champions League Final. We also saw it in the first half on Saturday, when they were marginally the better team.
But in the same way that they lost their way in the second period at the Bernabeu this weekend, Los Blancos have also lost their way in general this season and Zidane appears to be unable to do anything about it.
Before long, he won’t get many more chances. Club President Florentino Perez is not noted for his patience, once firing Vicente Del Bosque the day after he won the league and also axing popular Carlo Ancelotti a year after winning the Champions League, and the trophies taken by Zidane in the past will count for nothing if he doesn’t look capable of delivering more in the near future.
Realistically, Perez would be taking drastic measures even by his own standards if he dismissed Zidane now, and the Frenchman probably has a few weeks to show that he really is capable of turning things around.
But then, on 14 February, comes the crunch date: Real vs Paris St Germain in the first leg of the Champions League last 16.
If Neymar, Mbappe, Cavani and co are able to dismantle Zidane’s men in the same way that Barcelona did this weekend, his time will probably be up.
