Madrid is a less and less imposing mask which melts more and more quickly, and in Alava there was no exception to the sign of the times of the season: makeup of Courtois and Mbappé, almost always in solitary and heroic actions disconnected from the choral game, and then a slow sinking which sometimes affects the scoreboard and other times not (Courtois again). In Alava, the game began as an unintentional comedy. Kylian Mbappé received a blow to the knee, crouched in delicate moments, looked at the group with concern and limped for several seconds until Fede Valverde sent him a blow. His troubles were forgotten: he controlled with the left, saving an opponent, and shot in spurts. A little later, the ball reached the French attacker in depth. He got rid of his marker by dancing at times: several touches of the ball at full speed so that the Alavés player did not know whether or not to put his leg, nor when. He decided it after Mbappé scored the goal, a great goal, another great goal.
The score did not scare Alavés or encourage Madrid. The team’s drive, desire and ingenuity fail. With the ball it’s depressing, without it there is always the possibility of a counter-attack on their rockets. But the underlying problem is not strictly related to football, or not only. Madrid lives in an uncomfortable contradiction: it depends on Mbappé as if he had been at the club for ten years, but the Frenchman still does not know exactly what type of team it is, nor what is expected of him beyond solving boredom. There are evenings, like this one in Alava, where we don’t ask Mbappé to play well: we ask him to repair the score. That his goals retroactively control a game that never existed.
The paradox is that the Madrid of this season, so poor in ideas, so poor in mechanisms, only shines when the game breaks down, when chaos opens like a corridor.
Alava was a perfect example. Mbappé’s great goal seemed to announce one of those matches that the Madrid of old resolved through pure inertia. But this Madrid has no inertia: he is dizzy. He plays and plays again, always on foot, always horizontal, on the edge of a chewing melancholy. And when he loses the ball, when the pace is imposed by someone else, he collapses as if suddenly discovering that he has been living beyond his means for weeks. Sometimes the result is good, sometimes not. It doesn’t matter: the feeling is the same, that of a team playing with a mask and without feet.
Madrid needs its own light. He needs to regain the feeling that he is dominating matches, not surviving them. The season still offers time to rebuild, but the clock is louder than ever. Anything can happen because the old and tired eyes of Real Madrid fans have seen it all. This is now a team that depends on the most decisive player in the world without really knowing how to integrate it into an idea, because the idea is no longer there. And meanwhile, the championship advances and Madrid is still there, winning 1-2 without really knowing why, as if each victory was a small exception to the general climate of resignation.
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