Three months is an eternity in soccer. And the Real has received an invoice as objective as it is difficult to budget. It is the time that has elapsed between the match in Ipurua and the Real–Osasuna from Anoeta, the time of confined soccer. If in the run-up to returning to compete we did not have any valid criteria to position ourselves on how the teams would behave after the break and we clung to the objective factors to assume that the txuri urdin squad would be able to maintain the offered level in June and July until March, after playing the first two days after the restart, there is little doubt that Real needs to return to the beginning. Reset all their football mechanisms since before Osasuna and Alavés it has seemed a vulgar shadow of itself.
And it will have to do with the added pressure of the lack of room for maneuver between each game, the lack of time to correct and train, and the enormous expectations it had generated until the championship stopped. To this last aspect you should be able to respond with solvency since they are the same players, with the same talent. The reaction, therefore, goes through a personal introspection, by the individual assumption that it is as if another League had started, with the addition that the games are played by the knife because all the objectives are at stake. Although only the recovery of the collective mechanisms will allow the best individual version to reappear, helping the chain to work again perfectly greased.
And in front of all is the coach, for whom these 11 games represent an examination of the utmost importance since he is the main person in charge of equipping Real with the same mechanisms that made him generate in Gipuzkoa the greatest illusion in the last quarter of century. Starting with being able to play with the ball and people on the opposite field, something that has not been achieved almost at any time in the first two games. And continuing, if necessary, to review and qualify the proposal if necessary. Because this one, now, doesn't work.
A light that does not shine
The muscle injury suffered by
Asier
Illarramendi
It must have had a tremendous moral impact for the 30-year-old Mutrikuarra. After having played only five games in the last 16 months and when his reappearance was approaching – despite the fact that he had admitted to continuing with discomfort – this new break will lead him to give more spin to a head that, I fear, has been working more than advisable in recent times. It will not be easy that
Illarra
play this season what will only deepen in a process in which, unfortunately, its light is dimly dimmed, it shines less and less.
And this is terrible news for Real, as he is one of the soccer players with the highest level and category that Zubieta has given in the last 20 years but who, due to various factors, has not achieved the ascendancy that his potential is supposed trajectory. This week it has been ten years since his debut and, however, he has only played 202 games for Real (between 2013 and 2015 he played for Madrid). Beyond numbers,
Illarra
It has not achieved in this time a continuous performance, at the height of its indisputable figure. After his best campaign in 2013, he went to the Bernabéu and, after his return, only in 16/17 has a player who Real has always missed shone without question.
Real have failed to win their first two games after the halt to two teams led by two of their last five coaches. Jagoba
Get down and Asier
Garitano, with different nuances in their proposals, have clearly exceeded in the approach and development of the party to Imanol, proving her worth to those who questioned her at Real.
Leganés lost his first two games after the break and is the main candidate to descend. The miraculous thing, and in that an old school coach like Javier Aguirre has a lot of merit, is that they are not descended anymore when in the heat of competition they have taken away their two best players, Braithwaite and He
Nesyri, to play secondary roles in Barça and Seville.