After being four games without hardly participating with Real Madrid, Isco was one of the great novelties in Zinedine Zidane's lineup… And one of his failures in the resounding defeat at Mestalla. The man from Malaga faded onto the pitch of the team's stadium where he began to emerge at the beginning of the decade. Maybe Zizou had decided to give him another chance on the white team. On Saturday, at the press conference prior to the clash, and after two questions about Arroyo de la Miel, the decision of the white coach could be intuited. Perhaps, his remarkable performance against the Valencians in the semifinal match of the Super Cup held in Saudi Arabia, could also influence the choice of 22 to start the match in Valencian lands.
But Isco seems not to be at the beginning of the season. The man from Malaga was one of the Madrid players who lost the most balls (10), by just one recovery. In addition, it has the lowest percentage of duels won (16.7%) of the 15 white field players who participated in the match against Valencia. And that despite the fact that Zidane seemed to give him a new opportunity after being hunted last October in the stands of the Camp Nou criticizing the French coach.
And it is that for two campaigns, Isco seems to have entered an irrepressible downhill slope. To such an extent that Solari smelled it and began to leave him out of the calls … as soon as he was appointed Madrid coach, replacing Lopetegui in October 2018. The relationship between Solari and Isco came to have bad gestures from the player towards the coach who decided to leave him in the stands. The culminating moment came in the terrible defeat against Ajax in March 2019: when the player found out that he was not in the squad for the second leg of the Champions League against the Dutch team, he decided not to get on the team bus . The coach explained the situation to the club, and the club decided to open a disciplinary file. The man from Malaga did not even travel to Valladolid in the last game. The day before, Solari dropped two bombs at the press conference (he arrived an hour and a half afternoon from the set time), which everyone thought was heading to Malaga: “To play you have to get physically fit first and then the form. competitive, it is inexorable ”. The second was terribly hard: “To those who have not been up to the shield, I told them.”
However, the following day, March 11 and after having won in Valladolid, Solari was dismissed as the white coach and was relieved by Zinedine Zidane, who resumed the white team bench. One of his first messages favored Isco: “There is no file.” The second was more resounding: he started in the first game of his second stage. Isco returned it by scoring the first goal against Celta that opened this new phase of Zizou on the white bench. 604 days later, everything is quite similar to the stage that the Malaga lived with Solari. A Solari who saw, smelled it and decided. Now it's up to Zidane to decide: if he gives him a new chance or cuts his losses …