Result Madrid – Mallorca: Madrid responds (2-0)

In the League race between Madrid and Barça, the Zidane team has been entrusted to Vinicius and the Brazilian, the best Real Madrid player for the second consecutive game and, finally, with clairvoyance in the definition to end his good plays with goals, scored the first goal against Mallorca and opened the way for the full four wins for the Whites since the resumption of the League, although not without controversy.

The white team, with an offensively atypical disposition of the French coach, had shadows in the performance of Bale or Hazard behind the lead, with stretches in which the dominance of the match was Majorcan and only a loss of ball with an apparent lack of Carvajal enabled the scoreboard to open. Then Ramos scored from a foul direct and Madrid did not attack much more, before returning to play on Sunday against Espanyol.

The atypical alignments presented by the two teams, Mallorca with three central defenders and Madrid with four attackers, they made sure that each time Zidane’s men came to the attack, and they were many, it had an advantageous numerical superiority.

In return, Mallorca had more players in the center of the field and, after the first ten minutes, took control of the ball and the game. The day that Casemiro was not sanctioned, Zidane gave Kroos rest and ordered a double pivot with Modric and Valverde that proved insufficient to control the match, more due to numerical inferiority than to the low performance of those involved, especially Modric.

Surprising eleven

As usual, Zidane surprised with the lineup. The most unexpected, by force of having believed many times that it would happen without it ever happening, was the ownership of a Bale, in the fourth game of the resumption of the League, which endorsed its insignificance in the Madrid game.

The moment that the balance of the systems was decided was a loss of ball from Dani Rodríguez, after a Carvajal’s charge not sanctioned by the referee (the arbitration analysts of the SER network, COPE and Radio Marca agreed that it was a fault), placed there as the idea of ​​a screenwriter to fuel suspicions. The ball ended at the feet of Vinicius and the Brazilian, before Reina’s departure, defined with a mastery that he had not exhibited in Spain, with a choppy touch that entered near the crossbar to make it 1-0.

For the first time, Zidane included in the same lineup Hazard and Vinicius And, moments after the goal, in his hot minutes, the Brazilian returned to enjoy a heads-up play that he solved with a petroleum jelly that ended up on the crossbar. The Belgian, on the contrary, found no moments to overflow and had no role in the hour he played.

Much more comfortable

With the score in favor, Madrid felt more comfortable and began to appear Benzema or Modric. Even so, at the beginning of the second part the white sentence was not glimpsed as something imminent and the Mallorca, well settled on the grass, was still mired in attempts to convert their domain on occasions.

The second white goal came to set pieces, with a Sergio Ramos’ flawless free kick impossible for goalkeeper Reina and Dani Rodríguez in his career towards goal. With the changes at game time, Zidane naturalized the lineup with the entry of Kroos and the game went through minutes of little activity between the sensation of the work done by the Whites and the helplessness of a Mallorca that did not stop trying to attack and had occasions to reduce differences.

Asensio and Isco, recently recovered from a muscle injury, entered Madrid, but Zidane’s team was far from making the match the offensive festival that Zidane had planned with the alienation. In the end there was time for the most residual players in the squad: Mariano and Brahim Díaz. In Mallorca the youth squad debuted at the age of 15 Luka Romero, Argentine born in Mexico, the youngest in the history of the League.