The afternoon that the Bernabéu was awaiting Mbappé’s first goal for Real Madrid, after he had scored there twice for PSG, with Ronaldo in the stands, it was Endrick who made his debut, having also scored before, but for Brazil. The crowd believed in the Frenchman’s goal until his last run, one on one with the goalkeeper, with a suffocating game finally open, and although he did not succeed, they saw him off on their feet anyway. It had been a hard day, with a Valladolid team that was tough, confident in its endurance, which frustrated Real Madrid for many minutes. So much so that they were only able to break through with a missile from Valverde from a long-range free kick.
Until then, Mbappé’s arrival at the Bernabéu, finally in white, was a classic trap. A well-known landscape: Valladolid crowded against their area, adding Darwin Machís to those behind to form a line of five behind another of four. A suffocating panorama. Madrid went from right to left, from Rodrygo to Vinicius, without finding a gap. The traffic through the centre was impracticable. There, in place of the injured Bellingham, Ancelotti had included Güler, who this time went ahead of Modric and gave a notable performance. But the Turk, a midfielder between the Brazilians and behind Mbappé, at first did not see the way to even turn around there.
Up front, the Frenchman kept wandering around the forwards between the defenders, with no one daring to pass the ball to him. No one was willing to take that risk in the jam. Güler tried from below, but there was so little space that Mbappé found himself offside. The best the Frenchman could find was a couple of passes behind him that Rüdiger sent from the defence. From one he volleyed with his left foot that Hein stopped. Nothing more.
Madrid chewed up the game, and the game became a mess. Rodrygo tried to skate between five opponents from the right, where he spent more time stationary, but the adventure died when he reached the crowding of the area. Valverde also tried to gallop, but entering there was like falling into a funnel. Valladolid pressed a little more and Madrid was strangled.
Pezzolano’s team, newly promoted, had calculated that their chances against the reigning champions lay in resistance. And in the struggle of Marcos André, dedicated to the solitary mission of hunting something between Rüdiger and Militão, very fast, forceful, increasingly fine and similar to that version of himself as a dominant centre-back from before the injury.
The story of the knot was well known. So was the story of how it was loosened. With a goal, which did not come through play, as Valladolid was suffocated in its order. Valverde broke the deadlock of the match with a shot from a free kick, cooked up by Güler and Rodrygo, which slipped in after lightly touching Juric.
The blow and the changes with which Pezzolano tried to counter it, and which allowed him to respond with a couple of blows, opened up Valladolid and that’s where Güler flourished, who until then had squeezed himself out in defence while looking for solutions. From that point on, he was the dominant Güler of the Euros, controlling the game through the centre and reaching the penalty spot. From there he finished off three passes back. He also took a shot from further away that Hein had to defuse. And when the Turk was in full take-off, Ancelotti took him off, along with Rodrygo, to bring on Modric and Brahim. The Malaga native, in the queue of Madrid attackers like Güler, and who also lives with his finger on the trigger, found the goal with a delicate chip after a ball behind his back. The same as Endrick, in the same waiting room, who came on and scored in the remainder of added time. Mbappé didn’t score, but Ancelotti has a queue to add.
You can follow EL PAÍS Sports on Facebook and Xor sign up here to receive our newsletter.
