In the aftermath of Real Madrid’s Wednesday night Copa del Rey exit, Lucas Vazquez’s no-excuses message was admirable, with the player insisting that his team could not use their injury crisis as justification for losing to Celta Vigo.
However, he would have had every right to lament Los Blancos’ injury curse as their medical room has been one of the busiest in the entire continent so far this season.
“We came into this match having shown all season that whoever plays responds well,” the forward said immediately after the 2-2 second leg draw – and 4-3 aggregate defeat.
“So it would perhaps be opportunistic to say that the injuries played a part today.”
In theory, his point makes sense, as Real Madrid have been without key players since day one of the season when Keylor Navas, Cristiano Ronaldo and Karim Benzema returned from their summer exploits with various issues.
Despite those injuries and the ones that would affect a total of 19 members of their squad over the coming months, Los Blancos always found a way to survive and they kept their unbeaten run going all the way until the 41st match in Seville at the start of this month.
Vazquez’s point, then, was that it would be self-serving to consider these extra few knocks collected over the past month as the final straw that broke the camel’s undefeated run, but every squad has a limit as to how many absences it can absorb and it is not unfair to say that Real Madrid have reached it.
Raphael Varane, Pepe, Dani Carvajal, Marcelo, Luka Modric, James Rodriguez and Gareth Bale are all among the best players in the world – indeed, Pepe, Modric and Bale made the 2016 Ballon d’Or shortlist – yet none of them were available to Zinedine Zidane for this win-or-go-home contest in Galicia.
To have such talent missing from one team all at once is almost unprecedented and it left Real Madrid to field the out-of-form and out-of-luck Danilo at right-back, to play Casemiro as a makeshift centre-back and to leave Toni Kroos with Mateo Kovacic and Marco Asensio as his unfamiliar midfield sidekicks.
Rarely can a club justifiably blame injuries for a defeat given that assembling a squad with the depth to cover absences is part of football.
However, Real Madrid’s case is a unique one as they could not have realistically constructed their squad any better, hence why they haven’t felt the impact of their season of injuries until now.
Nobody likes to hear players or coaches whining about the negative impact of injuries, so credit is due to Lucas Vazquez for avoiding that temptation, but nobody could blame him had he indulged in some frustrated finger-pointing at the injury gods.
Sometimes you need to call a spade a spade and the capital city club’s injury handicap deserves to be labelled as such.
Bron: Marca
