#360View: Zidane must keep Real tight at the back in UCL

Andy West 14:21 17/02/2016
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  • Real Madrid have seemed defensively vunerable under Zinedine Zidane.

    All things considered, Zinedine Zidane has enjoyed a fruitful first few weeks in his managerial career with Real Madrid. But now things are about to get much more serious.

    Tonight’s Champions League trip to Roma not only marks Zidane’s coaching debut in a competition which saw him score arguably his greatest goal, it also marks the toughest and most meaningful challenge so far.

    Especially against the remarkable statistic that Madrid haven’t won a two-legged tie against an Italian side since 1987.

    As a club, Real Madrid always gauge their achievements by the Champions League. With 10 European crowns under their belt, it is a competition they have won more than any other team, allowing them to feel with more than a little justification that it is ‘their’ tournament.

    And its significance this season is even greater, because it provides Zidane and his team with their only realistic chance of silverware.

    When Zidane took over at the Bernabeu, the club had already been thrown out of the Copa del Rey for administrative bungling and surrendered a significant advantage to Barcelona in the La Liga title race.

    Tonight, Barca have the opportunity to move seven points clear of Los Blancos by winning their game in hand at Sporting Gijon – and the gap would effectively be eight points due to the head-to-head ruling following the Catalan’s thumping 4-0 win in Madrid in November. That scenario will give Zidane the painful realisation that even if Los Blancos win every single league game between now and the end of the season, it may well still not be enough to bring the championship back to the Spanish capital for the first time since 2012.

    The Champions League, therefore, is clearly the biggest priority – in reality that’s always the case, but right now it is looming even larger than usual over everything else.

    With Real in free-scoring form, there is reason for confidence that a moderate Roma team will be dispatched comfortably; indeed, it would be no surprise to see Zidane’s team win tonight, giving themselves a stress-free return tie in a couple of weeks. But the fact that Los Blancos have been scoring goals by the bucketload so far under Zidane – 20 in just five games – should not allow them to lapse into complacency.

    Saturday’s 4-2 victory over Athletic Bilbao was extremely flattering, with the Basque side the better team in the opening half but left to rue their failure to convert more of the many chances they created.

    Zidane took over from Rafa Benitez promising a more attack-minded, swashbuckling style, and the number of goals they have been scoring under his leadership shows he is staying true to his word.

    But Bilbao also demonstrated that so far, the French coach has not quite achieved the characteristic which was always much discussed but remained elusive for his predecessors Benitez and Carlo Ancelotti: balance.

    At times, it appears that Zidane is operating by the maxim: ‘If you score three, we’ll score four’.

    At the highest level, that approach will simply not work, and the most intriguing aspect in Rome is not whether Cristiano Ronaldo and company will be capable of scoring – we know they can – but whether Roma will be good enough to exploit Madrid’s defensive vulnerabilities.

    If they do, Zidane’s honeymoon period could be set for a swift end.

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