LONDON — Real Madrid
needs to win the Champions League the way a capsized crew needs a life
raft. Its team, one of the most expensive ever assembled, won at home,
2-0, to complete what looked like a rout of Roma over the two legs.
Looks can be deceiving.
Though Cristiano Ronaldo
scored again for his 90th goal in 123 Champions League appearances, the
evidence is that the good ship Real Madrid is less of a force and less
complete than Barcelona or Bayern Munich, the two most impressive teams
in this year’s tournament.
For more than an hour Tuesday in Santiago Bernabéu Stadium, it was Roma that created the better chances.
Created, and squandered.
If
only Roma had a finisher remotely like Ronaldo, it would have
comfortably wiped out the two-goal deficit it dug for itself after
losing the first leg. “I’m asking my team to do the impossible,” Roma
Coach Luciano Spalletti had said before the game in Madrid. “The way
they are training allows me to ask that. But we mustn’t be weak
mentally.”
Roma
has excelled in Italy this year — it has won seven straight in Serie A —
and Spalletti easily identified the obvious flaw in Madrid’s lineup. He
told his players, particularly the speedy Egyptian winger Mohamed
Salah, to get behind Madrid’s left back, Marcelo, and create havoc
there.
Salah
did that part to perfection. Marcelo is adventurous at going forward
and linking up with Ronaldo, but the Brazilian has barely any
inclination to fulfill his defensive duties.
Madrid
Manager Zinedine Zidane, a marvelous player who now is a rookie coach,
appeared happy enough to pick Marcelo. Why? Perhaps because what Zidane
best knows and loves about soccer is attacking and exploiting the
opponent’s weakness. He did it par excellence as a Real Madrid forward.
And earlier this week, one of his players, Raphaël Varane, said, “He is a
coach who loves the game and loves attacking football. He likes
movement, moving the ball around quickly and playing higher up the
pitch.”
Marcelo,
then, is a definite Zidane pick. But the risks are obvious: On Tuesday
night, Salah (twice), Edin Dzeko and Alessandro Florenzi were in good
position to score, one on one, against the Madrid goalkeeper Keylor
Navas.
Only
once did the goalkeeper need to show his agility to make the save. The
other three shots went wide. And Spalletti’s face on the sideline showed
that he feared that once such opportunities came Real Madrid’s way,
there would be no such wastefulness.
Madrid,
to be sure, was carving out its own openings: Statistics had Real
having 37 shots on goal to Roma’s 12. But that statistic didn’t tell the
whole truth.
Most
of Real Madrid’s attempts came from long range, against a
well-organized double line of Roma defenders. And most were either off
target or so tame they were mere catching practice for Roma keeper
Wojciech Szczesny.
When
he was finally beaten, it was by Ronaldo, of course. A week or so back,
when some in Madrid’s media were prematurely calling time on Ronaldo’s
career, his response was to tell them to look at the statistics because
they never lie.
Ronaldo
was booed by a sizable portion of the crowd Tuesday, but in a handful
of minutes, between the 64th and 68th, he scored the first goal and set
up the other by James Rodríguez.
Neither
finish was a work of art. Rodríguez’s shot went straight through the
legs of the goalkeeper, and Ronaldo’s was tapped in from close range,
although it did require him to think and move quickly to reach the low
cross by Lucas Vázquez.
Vázquez
is that rarity, a player actually produced by the Real Madrid youth
system. The 24-year-old had to wait a long time for his breakthrough
season in Real’s white, and he spent last season at Espanyol, the other
club in Barcelona. Vázquez’s role on Tuesday was to come off the bench
and replace Gareth Bale — recently returned from injury — once he tired.
After
linking up with Luka Modric, Vázquez danced past a defender and
demonstrated that he had the talent to shine, if his club allowed him to
show it.
Ronaldo
now has 353 goals in 336 games with Madrid, and no one would deny that
he is a superstar. Yet, the Madrid fans boo him. The older supporters
look beyond the goal totals and want less hubris. They saw it in
previous stars like Alfredo Di Stéfano and, later, in Zidane.
And
Tuesday, the crowd that harangued Ronaldo gave a standing ovation to a
man who never played for them. As the game neared its end, Roma sent it
its longtime magician, Francesco Totti.
Now
39, Totti first wore Roma’s distinctive purple and golden yellow when
he was 16. Real once bid for him, but Totti always was a one-team kind
of a guy.
He can no longer inspire his beloved team to victory, as he once could with instinctive and almost insolent guile.
But
as he made a cameo during his 595th game for Roma — most likely his
last appearance at the Bernabéu — Totti was given the ovation denied to
the man who scored the game winner, Ronaldo.
Spalletti
reiterated after the contest that his team needed, somehow, to toughen
up on the mental side of the game, something Totti never had a problem
with.
But
by fielding Totti at the end, he demonstrated that Roma is also
woefully short in what Madrid has in abundance: the ability to score
goals. And Real, which has no chance to win its league and has only the
Champions League left to play for, advanced to the quarterfinals for the
sixth year in a row.
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