Time to give Real Madrid due credit: they are 90 mins from true greatness
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Updated 11/05/2017 at 08:39 GMT
Real Madrid are in the Champions League final for the third time in four years, writes Pete Jenson, and it's the result of some long-term planning coming to fruition.
Isco of Real Madrid celebrates scoring his team's opening goal during the UEFA Champions League Semi Final second leg match between Club Atletico de Madrid and Real Madrid CF
Image credit: Getty Images
Real Madrid are 90 minutes from doing what no team has done before and for all that the purists moan that they often win without playing well, or that Zinedine Zidane is not worthy of two Champions League finals in two years, it might be time to give them some credit – every great team is a series of very good decisions and this Real Madrid side will have to go down as one of the greats if things go their way on June 3 in Cardiff.
Not all those good decisions have been made by the same people. Those who took a 19-year-old left-back from Brazil 10 years ago in the hope that he might one day fill Roberto Carlos’ boots are long gone from the club but on Marcelo rumbles, on course for his third final.
Likewise Cristiano Ronaldo was a signing inherited by the current regime from the previous president. And whoever picked Sergio Ramos out as a teenager in Sevilla 12 years ago and persuaded president Florentino Perez to stop buying foreign forwards and pick-up a Spanish defender also deserves massive credit.
Ramos, Ronaldo and Marcelo are now long-established club captains – the backbone of the team that won in Lisbon and Milan and will now try to beat Juventus in Cardiff too.
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Isco (C) of Real Madrid celebrates scoring his team's opening goal with Cristiano Ronaldo (L) and Casemiro during the UEFA Champions League Semi Final second leg match between Club Atletico de Madrid and Real Madrid CF at Vicente Calderon Stadium on May 1
Image credit: Getty Images
The president has been getting things right as well. Two years ago he instructed those around him to start signing young players – partly in preparation for the then imminent transfer ban, and partly to stop Barcelona doing it. Madrid beat Barca to the signing of Marco Asensio and now they own the next best thing in Spanish football.
Madrid have started signing the players Barcelona should. For Barca to continue their domination of European football it was fundamental that they made sure Xavi and Andres Iniesta were replaced but despite it screaming them in the face – and the late great Johan Cruyff was one of those making the noise – they allowed both Isco and Toni Kroos to go to the Spanish capital instead of Catalonia.
Then there is the decision to shift Mesut Ozil and Gonzalo Higuain to pay for Bale and the decision to sell Angel Di Maria to bring in James Rodriguez. Bale has played an important part in the last two Champions League successes and now he can make it a hat-trick in his own backyard, if he is fit.
Rodriguez scored twice at the weekend as Madrid beat Granada. He can’t get in the team but he’s played enough football to keep his price high. He will be flogged in the summer to finance the next shiny new signing, be it Eden Hazard or Kylian Mbappe. How will they fit the new man in? Somehow they always do. And now the club seem to have fallen backside first into their perfect coach as well.
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Real Madrid's French coach Zinedine Zidane gestures during a press conference at Valdebebas Sport City in Madrid on May 9, 2017 on the eve of their Champions League semi final second leg football match against Atletico de Madrid (Getty Images)
Image credit: Getty Images
Zidane took over because the players didn’t like Rafa Benitez’s heavy touch. He has kept the peace despite having 22 players all worthy of a starting berth in a way that Benitez and Jose Mourinho before him failed to do. You perhaps don’t need to be a coaching genius to manage this group. But you do need to know how to ‘manage’ the group and he has done that brilliantly.
They deserve to be in the Cardiff final. It’s a long-running joke that they get the draw sent to them the night before like a hotel breakfast menu. If that were so it’s a mystery why they picked Dortmund in the group stage and Napoli, Bayern and Atletico in the knock-out rounds.
It’s been a hard path but they have proved tough enough. Why have the English clubs not come close to building anything similar in the same period of time? It’s true they don’t take the same lion’s share of television money from the national pot but they have the billionaire foreign investors that Madrid don’t.
Madrid are not the best there is right now just because of money. If this were nothing more than finances the Premier League would not be watching the semi-finals from afar.
Madrid have got the right balance between homegrowns and exports, and found talismen, be they nationals or not (Ramos, Marcelo, Ronaldo), who have carried the club. That’s the challenge for English teams in the next few years.
“We still have not won anything,” said Zidane on Wednesday night. That ought to be remedied in the next 10 days as they take the league title. The European Cup could follow and it might not be the last for this brilliantly assembled group.
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