League Opener or Pre-Season friendly
Real Madrid started their title defense on the eve of 20th September with a disappointing draw. Even after performing so brilliantly last season, Madrid could not prove to be lethal in the final third against Sociedad.
Zidane is a man who requires time, who requires practice matches to change his team's performance. In short, he requires a proper preseason, which he didn't get this time. This lead to his tactical experiments, which in turn made Real Madrid less lethal than other European Clubs who started their title defence with quite some firework. Keeping in mind that Zidane's 2 main attacking players were not in the squad, he still went with an experimental team with leaving Casemiro on the bench, while he should have played safe by starting Casemiro straight from the start.
In the game Madrid had a lot of possession around 67.7%, having a lot of shots near around 16 among which only 4 were on target. This is the department where Madrid lacked so much last night. And still, instead of bringing on Jovic or Mayoral to provide some support upfront, Zidane experimented with the young guns. This is one of the traits of Zidane, he only experiments with players in the matches which aren't worth winning, unlike La Liga's league matches. But he did experiment last night in the league match, this shows that he might have taken the Sociedad game as a warm-up for Real Madrid in this La Liga season. As losing a point or two at the start won't cost much but since after this, he needs to have a proper understanding of the XI which could bring goals, and how to play that XI. Because if we want to retain the league we need to score a lot as well as we defend.
Your thoughts on Zidane's preparation for the rest of the league.
Comments
Dear Saad Siddiqui, thank you for sharing your beautiful piece of art! It's one of the most complete blogs I've ever read here. I really enjoyed reading it and as a result, I've shared it on our main feed. In addition, I've edited it a bit to make it more comfortable to read from a phone screen. I hope your blog will encourage many other Madridistas to write their own opinions as well. Again, thank you for the contribution and we're waiting for your next blog! 🤩
Thank you for your words of appreciation. 🙂
Hazard instead of odegard
Hazard and Asensio were injured(not fully fit)