Waiting for Benzema

Benzema has an appointment with the goal at the Estadio de La Cerámica. The French forward has yet to score in the three league games played by Real Madrid. It's up to the 9 White. Only in one of the 11 campaigns that he has been wearing the white shirt did it take more than four games to debut his scoring account in the League. Besides that, Benzema, who has been Madrid's first league scorer on three occasions, now adds his longest drought at a start to the championship: 267 minutes waiting to score. Which does not mean that it has been far from the goal. In fact, he scored right after the start of the game against Betis, with a goal in minute 2 canceled for offside. Ten minutes later, he became an assistant with an exquisite pass for Valverde to overtake Zidane's at Villamarín.

The two league starts in which it was most difficult for Benzema to see the door were in the 2012-13 and 2017-18 seasons. In the first of those two seasons (which was Mourinho's third and last on the bench) he needed five games to score. As the first two were played as a substitute, he stopped the timer with 208 minutes. His latest debut was five years later, in 2017, when he scored on matchday eight, but it was still his fourth league game, because he had been injured on matchday three, precisely against Levante. Waited 247 minutes to score the first of his 12 goals in that league, his second worst record as a Madrid player.

The importance of Benzema's goals since Cristiano Ronaldo's departure has been growing. Without the Portuguese, the authorship of more than a quarter of the Madrid goals is Karim: 57 of the 211 goals for Madrid in the two recent seasons and the little that goes from the present, 27%. In the nine seasons that he coincided with CR7, he never exceeded 20%, although it was a very distorted percentage by the brutal numbers of the now Juve player. Ignoring Cristiano's goals, Benzema has scored 21.9% of Madrid's goals since he arrived.

Levante has scored 8 goals in 16 games, but the Estadio de la Cerámica, the eventual scene of today's game, is not particularly good at it.. There he has only scored once, in 2-2 with Villarreal in 2018-19.