Real Madrid will look for a feat against PSG on Wednesday at the Santiago Bernabéu, coming back from 1-0 in the first leg at the Parque de los Príncipes against a fearsome attack like that of Pochettino’s team and without two defensive mainstays like Casemiro and Mendy, both sanctioned. Courtois and the defense will mostly take care of not conceding goals, but that’s only half the job; the other half goes through scoring at least one goal to force extra time, if not two to be directly in the quarterfinals. And in that section, Madrid needs the best Vinicius to return.
The Brazilian is going through a delicate moment of the season. His performance has dropped, especially his goalscoring figures, and also assists: he has scored only one goal and given two assists in his last nine games. Nothing to do with the first nine of the course, in which he scored five goals and gave two assists, for example.
Goals and assists are the most visible part of his downturn, but other stats also show that he has trouble influencing the attack like before: in these last nine games he has made 1.33 shots per duel (in the course overall his average is 1.75) and 0.67 on target (1.17 in the season); he tries to dribble more (7.44 times per game; in the course in total, 6.86), but he does it somewhat less successfully (2.89 against 2.94). His percentage of completed dribbles in this section is 38%; in the overall course is 42% and in the first ten games of the season, it reached 46%.
Exhaustion may be playing a role, evidently: Vinicius has played 3,019 minutes out of a possible 3,570, 84.5%, to which should be added the calls with Brazil, where his minutes are growing stop by stop, and the intercontinental travel that these calls cause. Ancelotti, however, does not think about preventively rotating the Brazilian: “The has to stop when we see him tired. When he cannot show his qualities on the field or when he is injured. Give him rest like this, because it may be that in two months he will be tired, no. When he’s tired, he won’t play. I will change it in two months. Now I don’t see him tired”, said the coach before the Cup round of 16 match against Elche.
And while match overload can put a strain on a player’s legs, motivation like the one generated by a date like Wednesday’s It has an activating effect that, in the case of Vinicius, also has an important addition: the opportunity for the Brazilian to indulge himself in a great European night at the Bernabéu. Against PSG, Vini can begin to write a story like the one already signed by names like Juanito, Santillana or Cristiano, protagonists of great European comebacks.
Because Vinicius and the Champions, at the moment, have not fully understood each other. In his first year at Madrid he hardly had minutes in the group stage (Solari gave them to him; Lopetegui did not count on him at all), he shone against Ajax in Amsterdam (he assisted Benzema), but he was seriously injured in the first part of the return, in which Madrid melted (1-4). In 2019-20 Zidane gave him little ball in the group stage, he had him in the first leg of the round of 16 against Citybut he did not give him a minute in the return leg, in which a certain disdainful attitude of the player who did not like the Marseille coach did not like a hair.
Zidane, Vinicius and the Champions
In 2020-21 he entered and left eleven, counting only from time to time for a Zidane whose eye Vini did not fill completelyalthough he had the pleasure of leading Madrid in the quarter-finals against Liverpool: he was the main architect of the 3-1 first leg with two goals, although he did so in an empty Alfredo Di Stéfano stadium, an atmosphere opposite to what which will take place at the Bernabéu this Wednesday. In the semifinals, against Chelsea, Zidane gave himself up to him, but halfway: in the second leg he had to act as a right wingerin the band where he cannot draw diagonals and very far from the zone of influence of a winger with goalscoring intentions.
And so we come to this 2021-22 season in which the Brazilian has scored two goals (both in Kiev against Shakhtar, the second one of the best goals of this edition of the tournament). On Wednesday, in a Bernabéu filled to the brim (everything that the remodeling works of the Madridista stadium allow), Vinicius can cross off the list going out on the shoulders on a night of the European Cup, that tournament that forms the main lines of Madrid genetics.