Another Impressive Scoreline Conceals Real’s Frailties

Real Madrid 5–0 Xerez
1–0 Ronaldo, 1′
2–0 Ronaldo, 75′
3–0 Guti, 78′
4–0 Ben­zema, 82′
5–0 Van Nis­tel­rooy, 89′

Real Madrid moved to the top of the table Sun­day, ahead of Barcelona on goal dif­fer­en­tial, after a 5–0 rout of Xerez that was a more dif­fi­cult affair than the final score might indi­cate. Cris­tiano Ronaldo net­ted a sec­ond straight brace for his new club and did all the mean­ing­ful scor­ing, giv­ing Real the two-goal cush­ion upon which they built their late-game goal flurry. Yet even with all the tal­ent in the world — quite lit­er­ally — wear­ing white on the pitch, many ques­tions remain for Madrid after a win that was less dom­i­nat­ing than one would expect against a newly pro­moted side.

Despite (or per­haps because of) the quar­ter of a bil­lion Euros splashed out this sum­mer, Real took the bet­ter part of 90 min­utes to finally click as a team. Last week I railed against their defen­sive mis­cues, but a sim­i­lar charge can be lev­eled against their offense, which con­tin­ues to rake in the goals despite play­ing a hap­haz­ard, indi­vid­u­al­is­tic style of foot­ball. After Ronaldo scored on a zinger in the first minute, Madrid appeared to go into hiber­na­tion for the next 70+ min­utes, cre­at­ing lit­tle more than moments of indi­vid­ual bril­liance in the midst of mediocre play. Xerez just kept plug­ging away, lit­tle engine that could style, and their mid­field did a com­mend­able job of jam­ming up the works and pre­vent­ing Madrid from ever find­ing a rhythm. With no Xabi Alonso to pull the strings in mid­field, Real were left with Gago and Lass play­ing the double-pivot and lit­tle cre­ativ­ity flow­ing from the midfield.

As much was made clear when Pel­le­grini yanked Raul and Kaka in favor of Granero and Guti, leav­ing CR9 to part­ner Ben­zema as the two out-and-out strik­ers. All of a sud­den the ball was mov­ing more flu­idly and play was built up from the mid­field to cre­ate oppor­tu­ni­ties for the attack­ing play­ers. Xerez clung to the one-goal deficit for a sur­pris­ingly long time, and the Andalu­cian side even had a num­ber of chances to tie the game. Their fail­ure to pro­vide any qual­ity ser­vice into the box was even­tu­ally their undo­ing, though, and with a quar­ter of an hour remain­ing Ronaldo skied in the box to head home Granero’s cor­ner and secure the victory.

After that, the flood­gates opened. Ben­zema whiffed at the ball, miss­ing it com­pletely about eight yards out, leav­ing it for Guti to clean up and smash past Xerez keeper Renan. The young French­man got his shortly there­after when he drove up the left­hand side, juked the defender out of posi­tion just enough, and then blasted a left-footed shot into the net for 4–0 and his first reg­u­lar sea­son goal with Real Madrid. Even Ruud Van Nis­tel­rooy got in on the act two min­utes from time, scor­ing Real’s fifth on a slot­ted shot that nut­megged the keeper and rewarded the stand­ing ova­tion he got from the fans on his introduction.

It was an amaz­ing final fif­teen min­utes that dis­played, in a brief flour­ish, all that these new-look Galac­ti­cos are capa­ble of. But the other 75 min­utes painted a more wor­ry­ing pic­ture, one of a team still strug­gling to find itself amidst all the new sign­ings and suf­fer­ing some grow­ing pains in the process. Xerez didn’t pos­sess enough threats to really test them defen­sively, but in the absence of defen­sive pres­sure their offense showed its own lack of flu­ency for much of the game. Unlike the team’s defen­sive trou­bles, though, I’m not exceed­ingly wor­ried about these offen­sive hicc-ups. They will be worked out, and in much less time than it will take to get the back line in order. And until all those kinks are ironed out, there will always be a Cris­tiano or a Kaka or a Ben­zema etc. etc. to pull another rab­bit out of the hat to save them. Today, there were five rab­bits to be found, four of them in quick suc­ces­sion, in the dis­patch­ing of Xerez. A bit more con­sis­tency and a lot more flu­ency will go a long way toward calm­ing the nerves of the fans who expressed their anx­i­ety as the lack of a sec­ond goal weighed heav­ier and heav­ier in this one. The goals will quiet the crit­ics for now, but for the sake of La Liga I hope they find their game sooner rather than later.

Tagged as: Cristiano Ronaldo, esteban granero, guti, Kaka, karim benzema, Manuel Pellegrini, Raúl, real madrid, ruud van nistelrooy, Xabi Alonso, xerez