THE DREAM has become a nightmare. The Real Madrid president, Florentino Perez, will preside over the European Cup final at the Bernabeu on May 22nd but his team, the most expensively assembled in history, will not be there.
As if to make matters worse, Barcelona still might be. Talk about rubbing it in. Someone else’s success would become the image of Madrid’s season, Perez’s first since returning unopposed as the saviour. Not that he will be the one who pays for it – heads will roll but his will not be among them. The coach Manuel Pellegrini is the first under scrutiny.
Real will now repackage winning the league title as a triumph, but no one is under any illusions. This season was defined by the European Cup and Real have gone out at the first knockout stage. When Perez became president again he talked about the need to do in one year what the club would normally do in three, about recovering Madrid’s “place in the world”.
The league means comparatively little: Ramon Calderon, dismissed as the worst president in history, won two. Their pursuit of the decima (the 10th) has been obsessive; hosting the final reinforced that. Calderon had requested it, Perez inherited it. His €258 million outlay was no coincidence.
The thing about spending that kind of money is that you have to win and win big. But Madrid have not. Their place has not changed: eliminated at the first knockout stage. That is why going out to Lyon is an unmitigated failure, regardless of the league.
It is the kind of catastrophe that can precipitate further problems, airing splits and exacerbating them. Guti talked about the lack of a team ethic, Pellegrini complained that his side had been individualistic, Cristiano Ronaldo went straight off without a word.
When Kaka was withdrawn, his press agent described Pellegrini on Twitter as a “coward who hides his own inadequacies by pointing at others”.
Kaka’s wife re-Tweeted the remark. There was, though, no hiding place for her husband. Ronaldo has been declared blameless but not Kaka.
“I’m sorry,” wrote AS’s columnist Tomas Roncero, a self-consciously fanatical Madrid supporter, “but my patience has run out with Kaka. A player who cost €75 million cannot play like some YTS apprentice.”
The search for people to blame did not start last night – it had already begun. Excuses were made in advance, the bandage had been put on before the wound. Gonzalo Higuain, top scorer but inherited from the old regime, a competitor to Karim Benzema, was already under pressure. All the easier to attack him for his open-goal miss.
Above all it is Pellegrini, long since attacked freely and with impunity, judged to be responsible for Madrid’s defeats but not their victories, who is the principal target. The inevitable names will now be bandied around – Rafa Benitez and Jose Mourinho among them. Pellegrini will not continue beyond the summer, if he even makes it that far. As a club Madrid were – somewhat unusually – cautious; the director general, Jorge Valdano, has appealed for calm and backed his coach while Perez maintained silence.
But Valdano backed Vicente del Bosque in 2003 and he left despite winning the title, because of defeat in the European Cup semi-final. Del Bosque was followed by five more coaches, €441 million worth of players and no titles in three years.
Pellegrini is not blameless but, like his predecessors, he has been expendable from the start. It is tempting to conclude that he can finally perform the task he was brought in to perform: providing a head to place on the block.
Guardian Service
