Ancelotti’s crossroads

With three weeks to go before the second leg against PSG, Carlo Ancelotti is thinking about it. For the transcendental clash against the Parisian team, he will not be able to count on either Casemiro or Ferland Mendy, both key players in the Madrid team. The two were warned when they arrived with two yellow cards to the duel at the Parc des Princes, and were reprimanded by the match official, the Italian Daniele Orsato, preventing them from being in the second leg.

AND This is where the problem appears: Madrid has three league matches ahead of Alavés (tonight at 9:00 p.m.), Rayo (Saturday 26, 6:30 p.m.) and Real Sociedad (March 5, 9:00 p.m.), all of them without leaving Madrid, so he can give his players more rest, and in which he should give players entry so that his key pieces are fresher to face the French. That said, there are three key matches for his league aspirations. Alavés occupies eighteenth place in the table, but Madrid has missed points with several of the teams that occupy the lower zone, such as Cádiz, for example. Rayo Vallecano has been untouchable in its stadium until 2022, in which it has three defeats in its last four games. Meanwhile, Real Sociedad is in the fight to enter European competitions next season.

In the press conference prior to the match against the Vitorian team, Ancelotti left several tactical pearls, especially about his approach against PSG, branded as defensive, but the most striking are those he left about these next matchs: “We are going to practice high pressure in the next matches. We have focused too much on low blocks and speed exits.” The second: “The problem is not the low block, but the verticality to get out later. And that has penalized us in recent games. It is not that we have changed the strategy, it is that the start from behind is costing us more. Both when we play with the goalkeeper and in steals”. There appear the figures of Valverde and Camavinga, young, with power and quality to press up. Another detail to take into account is Benzema’s recovery.

But the real problem is who will be the replacements for both Casemiro and Mendy. For that, Ancelotti should use these matches as ‘experiments’ to try to establish a defense in which the easiest solution is the presence of Alaba on the left side, with Nacho as a left-handed central defender accompanying Militao. Having Marcelo is another option, perhaps more risky against an attack made up of Neymar, Messi and Mbappé, who was responsible for devouring Carvajal again and again until he was relieved in the 72nd minute of the game. For that, Ancelotti has three games before the decisive duel. The first is against Alavés…