He is dominating the match over Bellingham, someone said, I suppose Carlos Martínez, in the broadcast. Of course. But the match was dominating Madrid’s season, the whole thing, broken not by matters of the game, which is what matters, but by matters related to mood, conduct, behavior: the season was thrown out the window the moment the main players not only gave up on quality, but on the desire to show it due to internal issues about whether they liked the coach or not. As if, with inertia, when they liked the coach they would play well because that’s how they are. No one is like that in the elite anymore.
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That moment when one follows their mark at a distance so as not to offend him, another who doesn’t know what to do when the ball comes to him, one more who in divided balls thinks that instead of using the body you have to make a fraction. It’s okay. Starting now to cut down the fallen tree, the sabotaged tree, is useless. It was enough to get on the field and show face. Brahim if anything, advancing alone with the ball saving opponents like a port horn blast, looking for the open space of Vinicius. Gonzalo, in open play resolving like Julio Salinas in the United States, who at least clumsily put the ball into the net. But what can be demanded of the youngest and most fighting one, the guy erased from the starting eleven for I don’t know how many matches, who misses, out of the hundred he couldn’t play, the ball he did have.
All the symptoms appeared in Barcelona in the first twenty minutes, enough reason for the average Madrid fan, not hysterical, to think about closing the match with a 3-0 and moving on, which is a huge thing but for which a couple of months are missing. Anyone knows that Madrid stripped of the title fight is a club that, bored from not being able to devour rivals or Champions, begins to self-mutilate with the frequency of a cannibal who misses his fresh tendons.
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So the inevitable happened: Madrid stopped competing even before losing. The serious thing is already known not to be the defeat but the benign resignation that at least five haven’t fallen. A team can be poorly trained, tired, aged or unbalanced; what it cannot afford is that air of a squad that considers itself above basic effort. It’s when every run seems humiliating, every pressure a nuisance, every contested ball a management that someone else should resolve. That’s where Madrid died.
It was curious and uncomfortable. Barça smelled blood and Madrid ran by pure historical inertia, hoping that the badge would push what the legs no longer push. Bellingham looking around like someone late to a family argument, Vinicius exhausted amid protests. All very terminal, very end of cycle, very Madrid when Madrid falls, because Madrid never, whether it wins or loses, can go unnoticed. And in August they will present themselves again as if nothing had happened, which is also a club tradition: pretending eternity even when it smells like fire. And it works, that much is true. If Madrid could explain itself, it wouldn’t exist.
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