Real Madrid-Milan The endless drought

A week after the League there is hardly any news in Madrid. And the lack of them is already bad news. Klagenfurt's friendly threw some lights (some improvement from Isco and Bale, a good tone from Alaba, a promising physical condition of the team, that Modric is still Modric …) and the usual shadow: it is a team with little goal without Benzema and absolutely invalid in the area without him. That is why he did not win against Milan. That is why it worries at the beginning of the course. That is why the fans are clamoring for Mbappé. The wait is getting agonizingly long.

There was a time, before the unexpected geopetrofutbolistic transformation, that Madrid and Milan were the two great world powers. They are still on the honor roll of the European Cup, but their influence has declined markedly. Madrid, after the loss of its nuclear arsenal with the departure of Cristiano, has barely remained on the poster. Last year he was given to fight the League until the last day and to reach the semifinals of the Champions League. Even so, he loses players (Varane, Ramos) to the new great fortunes and increasingly spans his galactic signings. Milan is doing even worse. Their main players are discards from the Premier (Tomori, Giroud) and even from Madrid (Theo, Brahim) and their second place in Serie A last year is the best in ten years. It's hard to believe in a club that was a paradigm of luxury and glamor under the reign of Berlusconi.

Isco reborn

Now, Madrid and Milan are what they seem. A team halfway there, with a notable gap between those who are fighting in glorious retreat and those who have not yet come out of the nest, and a I want and I can not Milan at the beginning of an impossible reconstruction. The duel, with an eleven more recognizable in Madrid than that of two weeks ago in Glasgow, left some notes that are going to be definitive: Alaba has come to be irretrievably central but he aspires to more, Zidane's 4-3-3 is still in force, Rodrygo is the young man who is closest to breaking the glass ceiling, Lucas Vázquez continues to be the plumber on duty, Benzema must be put in a ballot box between game and game, Bale and Isco are about to please the new boss and abandon their condition of lost cases, Marcelo and Jovic are still in the same point (dead) in which they left him and Pintus seems to have oxygenated to the team. Isco senses that the change of wind is now blowing his tail. He had moments of that influential gamer who's long gone.

The beginning was plenty of action. In a minute Maignan, who will never be Donnarumma, got tangled up in an exit with the ball at his feet that Madrid forgave him and, immediately, Theo, who has taken flight in Milan, had a supersonic entry in the white area and smashed his shot without an angle on the pole. That promised, but little by little Madrid was bridging the game from the order of Modric, who continues to have the team in his hands, and Isco and the speed of Bale, who seems to have returned to fulfill his contract, but also with his obligation .

The wrong penalty

Ancelotti's team was more in that final part of the first half. Isco was intercepted by a half-lap that looked like a goal and Alaba, with the Austrian public on his side, expanded his repertoire: he dubbed Marcelo as a winger sporadically, he got a good long-range shoe, it was disturbing in his own corners. And Bale gave air to that wasted left-hander with two long shots, better the first (rejected by Maignan) than the second, and a sprint / gale from its early days that Calabria stopped for the bravas in the area. As everything is incomplete in the career of the Welshman, he missed the penalty with a shot without power or placement.

As the preseason are to give the coach a panoramic vision of what he has, Ancelotti changed half the team at halftime, Praise and Bale among them. And he established the homegrown ranking: Miguel Gutiérrez and Blanco are the first on his list. They were also for Zidane. Such a radical mutation, however, did not change the game, which remained under the strict control of Madrid, now very beaten to the left by the vigor of Miguel Gutiérrez and Vinicius. Before giving way to Odegaard, Modric sent a great shot to the crossbar. That propensity to solve from afar brings Madrid's great defect to the surface: Benzema absent, the area causes allergies in the rest. It does not have midfielders with arrival (Casemiro was the second scorer of the team last year) and Jovic and Mariano, who shared the minutes, do not abandon their status as invisible.

Milan was very less. They did not reactivate the changes and only a shot from Brahim, which forced a huge stretch from Lunin, again in figure, created some concern. The final carousel of changes definitely upset the duel, which was no longer anyone's. The public spent the time doing the wave, Ancelotti turning to the scoring drought and Florentino waiting for news from Paris, in case the goal, like the children, comes from there.