The curse of '2'

Being a right back this season at Real Madrid in a risky position. Risk of ending up in the infirmary. The injuries that have punished the white wardrobe this campaign are particularly important with this demarcation. Carvajal has fallen suffering from his fifth injury of the season, while Lucas Vázquez, who has emerged as his replacement, is still convalescing left knee posterior cruciate ligament sprain. The two will miss the remainder of the season …

The plague of injuries has forced Zidane to line up eight players on the right flank, either as wingers or wingers. Odriozola, Nacho, Mendy and Valverde, in addition to the aforementioned Carvajal and Lucas Vázquez, have been starters in that position. They are joined by Vinicius and the Castillian Marvin, who played in that area for a few minutes of the game against Huesca in El Alcoraz. In total, eight different players. So what He has not used Militao, who performed in that position promptly in his spells at Porto and Sao Paulo and last season he played the last game there before confinement, against Betis.

It took three games for the first injury to cross Carvajal's path. An injury to the internal lateral ligament of his right knee that kept him out for a month and a half: all of October and the first half of November. Before the end of that month, a muscle injury to his right adductor muscle kept him off the pitch for another ten days. 2021 is being a real ordeal for Leganés. He started the year with discomfort, in mid-February he fell due to a muscle injury in the right thigh with tendon involvement and now, three games after his reappearance, he is breaking again. Carvajal has only been able to play 14 games this season, in which he has added just 1,042 minutes.

Nacho he was the first substitute for Dani. Coinciding with the first injury of the two, Odriozola, his natural replacement (who had started in the third game of the season, against Valladolid), was injured in the calf of his left leg. The multipurpose youth squad came out to remove, but was injured in his third game as a starter (not consecutive, because in between Mendy was the right back in the first game against Shakhtar), the Camp Nou Classic.

Zidane had to improvise with Lucas Vázquez, with an outstanding performance that consolidated the Galician in the starting position before the future losses of Carvajal. Some muscular discomfort after 20 games in a row as a starter (not only as a winger, but also some as a winger) opened the doors again for Odriozola, at a time when Zidane introduced the variants of Vinicius and Mendy in Huesca.

Lucas Vázquez was injured in the Clásico and, with Carvajal still in the infirmary, Zidane placed Valverde as a right back at Anfield. A solution to which the French technician could not give continuity due to the close contact of the Uruguayan with a positive for COVID and his own subsequent positive. Odriozola, who started against Getafe and Cádiz while Carvajal finished his penultimate recovery, is once again called up against Osasuna.