Unknown
Two games, two points, two match-balls. A simple account that can give Real Madrid their 34th League tonight if they beat Villarreal at Di Stéfano (follow the match live on As.com). In view of the classification, the game with the most cost for Zidane's. In view of what happened after the break, too. Calleja's team has won in its last four outings, with a single goal against.
Like Madrid, he had a thoroughbred outing in the post-pandemic, with 16 points out of 18 possible, but the defeats at home against Barcelona and Real Sociedad left him out of the Champions League. His accounts are also simple: one point gets him into the Europa League and three save him from seventh place, which he carries three previous rounds in his backpack. The question is whether Javi Calleja will throw himself into the open grave for the game or if he will save key pieces for Sunday, against Eibar, a simpler duel and against an opponent free of sins and objectives.
Calleja could reserve Cazorla, that miracle of science that at the end of the course will go with Xavi al Qatari Sadd. Cazorla has scored fifteen goals, eleven in the League. Only in his first year at Arsenal, in the prime of his career, was he more productive. Gerard Moreno has also been at the highest peak. With 16 goals, he is the national pichichi. If he marks any more, he will sign his most scoring League, including the last one with Espanyol, which was the one that brought him back to Villarreal. He has intervened in 30 targets, 52% of all of his team.
In offensive terms, Calleja's team is LaLiga's third artillery (58 goals). Also in the elaboration game (42 goals in play), but he loses far behind and on the stopped ball.
In today's forecast is the return to ownership of Chukwueze and Raúl Albiol's doubt, with four cards and warned. Above it will lack Alcácer and Bacca.
Aspiring the pichichi
At Madrid, Ramos hopes to win his 22nd title with Madrid and Benzema, the 19th. Eleven of them will have arrived with Zidane in less than four years. They are the three LaLiga characters. The Frenchman could even be a pichichi after having scored in all the months of competition. That regularity with the trigger (19 goals) was unknown during his first nine years at Madrid.
Zidane will get very close to the gala team, with its nine fixed and two open places depending on the rival and the drawing. Valverde could be the fourth midfielder. And it would even fit a fifth, with Isco, but it seems more likely that on the left he will pull Asensio or Vinicius. The Brazilian is still a removable footballer. He has been a substitute or has not played in six of the nine games after the break and is far from becoming an indispensable piece for the Frenchman.
Jovic returns to the list, who among injuries and isolations has thrown away the second part of the season. He also left the train before the break. In them is Bale. Zidane made his tone when asked by him. The Frenchman intends to give normality to the repeated substitution (100 minutes in the last nine games) of the most expensive player on the team. He will have won the League without him (he has not scored in the competition since September 1, curiously against Villarreal) and without the two that follow him in the ranking, Hazard and James, also absent in the decisive stage. Now it will be difficult to put the Welsh and the Colombian on the market, but for Zidane there is no better club policy than to be champion.