Arrogance is Madrid’s most dangerous weapon
Anfield crowd know football but Real faithful know all about winning, writes Miguel Delaney
IT was the most truly testing moment that Real Madrid had en route to the Champions League final, and of course just brought out one of the reasons that they are in that final.
Zinedine Zidane’s side had been brought to the brink of elimination by Juventus and what would have been the most sensational collapse in the competition’s history – trumping Barcelona’s against Roma the night before – only to be awarded a last-minute penalty for Cristiano Ronaldo’s killer blow. The real killer blow was to come from Marcelo, though.
“Obviously what happened to Barcelona wasn’t going to happen to us,” the Brazilian said, before winking: “because we’re Real Madrid.”
This utter belief is really what Liverpool are up against as much as anything, and may well trump their own.
Those close to the Anfield camp say there is a “real 2004/’05 feel” about the place, with that faith only further fired by Jurgen Klopp’s psychological management, the nature of their surge to the final and the belief this is “their” trophy.
Those at Real Madrid respect that, but can just as easily dismiss it, in the way they do most challenges.
No one, after all, believes like Real do. No one can believe like Real do.
No one can lay a claim to this trophy like they can. If it’s anyone’s trophy, it’s theirs.
The sheer arrogance from decades of that success and specifically that special haul of 12 European Cups just energises the entire club. You sense it as you walk through the appropriately grandiose surroundings and past appropriately grandly-dressed supporters.
UNDERCUT
They are the opposite of Barcelona in that way, too. While the Catalans have always been undercut by an underlying neurosis about the next potential crisis, something that Johan Cruyff referred to as “the eternal storm”, Real have always been underlaid by an overwhelming assurance.
It is why Marcelo’s comment best explains the club, and this spell of Champions League success, in a way nothing else can. So much of it does, after all, seem unexplainable when you properly consider the facts.
Should Real claim the trophy this season they will win just the fourth three in a row in history, and the first in 42 years. That would also make it four Champions Leagues in five years, representing the most resounding spell of victories since Real Madrid’s five in a row in the 1950s.
It would afford them a high pedestal in football’s pantheon, and so gloriously bring the club full circle… but at a time when they have so rarely looked fully complete.
It is a distinctive pattern now.
They have won so many Champions Leagues despite looking so unconvincing in so many matches. They have won so many Champions Leagues despite being unable to win anything more than one Spanish domestic title in that time.
To go deeper, few can even really explain what Zidane does as a manager. When the Real players are asked, they give vague answers about an “aura”, and one figure familiar with the dressing-room described the Frenchman as little more than “a clap-your-hands coach”.
And yet so many seasons end with the ultimate applause, and the trophy that trumps all else in the game.
It is almost as if this arrogance about being the best extends to best practice in football. Real can willingly defy all the supposedly definitive ways to run a team, all of the benefits of ultra-modern coaching systems, because they just put out a team of stars. They’re proving you can still do things the old way.
You can, of course, only prove that if you have a lot of old money, and Real are the oldest money in the game. This is the presumptuousness that such wealth brings, but that’s perhaps the point, too.
Real are not just a collection of individual stars in the way that so many newly-wealthy clubs are criticised of representing.
They are a collective of players specifically purchased because they match the Real ideals – there are stories of president Florentino Perez refusing to sign individuals because of supposedly “meek” personalities – and thereby further emboldened by those ideals.
The knowledge of that history, and the nous that is perpetuated by creating more history, means properly-established stars perform without doubt; without hesitation.
Truly controlling midfielders like Luka Modric and Toni Kroos have been bought for this reason, and because they are capable of imposing a style on the team that is not imposed from above. From there, they have that absolute absence of doubt that is personified by Ronaldo.
There couldn’t be more a Real Madrid player in that regard. The way he won the penalty against Juventus also
seemed the perfect representation of all this.
It was as if karma was finally catching up with them. Everything that somehow falls right for them was finally falling wrong. And yet… the worst possible elimination only ended up producing the best possible feeling; that this is why they are the best.
They did it again.
Such appeals to basic psychology may seem simplistic, but consider what they would mean to a squad like this. Players with supreme belief in their talent are further powered by a supreme confidence in their club, that they will always win. That is a very powerful weapon.
There is none of the doubt or second-guessing that is known to affect a striker like Gonzalo Higuain, someone the club discarded before this run of European glory.
Then there’s the way they have reduced a club as arrogant as Bayern Munich to such an inferiority complex, as they were defeated by Real for the sixth time in a row and just couldn’t get the goal required in the semi-finals.
To have that kind of effect, over that kind of club, really is something. The so-called ‘FC Hollywood’ were shown what star power really is.
Before that, the new money of Paris St-Germain was shown what they can’t buy.
For all of the criticism of what the modern Real are as an entity, too, this still isn’t a club you could say is
disconnected from its fan-base. You would struggle to find a crowd that so reflects its club’s feelings, so radiates that arrogance.
This is not a support that worries. They rightfully expect. The Anfield crowd may famously know their football, but the Bernabeu crowd knows winning.
After the Bayern semi-final, another helter-skelter match that got almost as tense as the Juve game, Zidane was asked how he felt.
“We believed in ourselves,” he said. Of course they did.
This, after all, is Real Madrid. They don’t need to be more than a club. They’re the ultimate club. (© Independent News Service)