Real Madrid suffered a nightmare performance in the Champions League on Wednesday night against a team they can usually count on beating, Liverpool.
The 2-0 scoreline, if anything, flattered the Merengues, who could have been battered by at least five if it weren’t for the continued heroics of goalkeeper Thibaut Courtois.
There is a lot of collective blame to go around for a team that looks dead to rights without the Br azilian contingent of Eder Militao, Rodrygo Goes, and Vinicius Junior available, but here are three men who have been especially woeful of late.
Ferland Mendy
That Ferland Mendy remains employed by Real Madrid is a downright farce. He is one of the worst players to have ever played for Real Madrid at a technical level, because he cannot cross, he cannot beat players one-on-one, and he is a liability to make a calamitous mistake at the back.
For years, I have likened his playing style to a kindergartner playing “hot potato” for the first time, and, unfortunately, the Frenchman’s technical acumen in his own half has been unimproved since then.
His defensive work is vastly overrated, too, because a traffic cone that is always positioned in the middle of a parking space will be as effective at blocking a vehicle as it is immobile and incapable of serving any other purpose.
That is Mendy’s defensive work in a nutshell, because the minute he is actually challenged by a top-level winger, he gets embarrassed, which is what Mohamed Salah did in drawing a silly penalty from him.
Mendy starting over Fran Garcia is a disaster waiting to happen, and it is no surprise that even his biggest supporter, Carlo Ancelotti, turned to Fran on the bench in the 70th minute of this match.
Antonio Rudiger
Yet Mendy somehow wasn’t the worst defender on the pitch, and at 31 years old, Antonio Rudiger is beginning to run out of excuses for his ill-disciplined positioning when a literal 21-year-old making his first starts for Real Madrid is light years ahead of him in terms of composure.
Rudiger has mastered the art of fooling the average viewer into thinking he is working hard by running around aimlessly, and all of his “intensity” is really just a means of making his defending even less effective.
He is the epitome of a man who is constantly in the wrong place, at the wrong time. You can rewatch so many Real Madrid goals allowed or close errors and watch how Rudiger is caught in no man’s land, in the vicinity of no attacker, or directly leaving his post.
Rudiger allows too many attackers to come in between him or simply loses sight of them. His days at Real Madrid should be numbered, especially at his age, and if Real were even slightly more proactive on the transfer market defensively, they would have already replaced him in the XI this summer.
Kylian Mbappe
Conor Bradley deserves full marks for stepping up to the plate and matching – if not exceeding – a world-class right back in Trent Alexander-Arnold, but it says a lot about where Kylian Mbappe is at in his career that he could not muster any sort of offense against a young, unproven Champions League debutant.
Mbappe was woeful – and not for the first time in a big spot this season. Real Madrid are literally doing everything to build the team around Mbappe, to the detriment of players who have accomplished a lot more than he has outside of the coddled World Cup environment that France offers him.
He missed a penalty, got crushed on challenges, and wasted so much time on counterattacks with his selfish “anticipatory” dribbling, hesitating for so long to make a pass that the Liverpool defense had ample time to regroup. In a sense, Mbappe functioned as auxiliary assistance to the defense, or, in other words, he was basically an Antony clone.
Real Madrid did not sign Mbappe for free. They spent a lot of money in bonuses and wages, so, when you add it all up, he is more expensive than players like Jude Bellingham and Vinicius Junior who, again, have far exceeded his production in the Spanish capital.
If his name were not “ Kylian Mbappe” and it were “Jese Rodriguez” or “ Mariano Diaz”, Carlo Ancelotti would not bat an eye in banishing Mbappe to the bench for even Endrick.
He’s skating by on reputation, but even Florentino Perez’s desire to make himself look good by having his pet project shine has a limit. It is not quite an “at all costs” mission – that’s what the word “winning” is for in Madrid.