12.04.23 Real Madrid (a)

April 12th 2022 produced one of the greatest football matches I’ve ever seen. For a glorious five minutes, Chelsea led 3-0 at the Bernabeu.

Real Madrid, the side with the most European trophies in club football by some distance, were on their knees. Blown away by a Chelsea side who looked like they could do no wrong. Unfortunately, a 40 yard outside of the foot pass by Lula Modrić had other ideas. Rodrygo levelled the scores on aggregate and Karim Benzema finished off a defeated looking Chelsea side in 30 minutes of extra time.

So painfully close to greatness, yet equally so far.

Chance would have it that Chelsea would draw Real Madrid for the third year in a row in the Champions League. A tie which European football had been starved off for the preceding 20 years was now rapidly in danger of becoming an everyday occurrence. Nevertheless, as soon as the draw came about again I knew it had to be done. After all, how many chances do you get in one lifetime to watch your team at the Bernabeu?

The last 11 or so days have been fairly typical as far as Todd Boehly’s reign over the club goes. We’ve had three different managers on the sim touchline for just four games and once again we find ourselves in a position where we are completely unable to find the back of the net. More on that later though.

My alarm ringing at 4:15 yesterday morning produced a very unwelcoming yet equally exciting wake up call. Having struggled to fall asleep the night before I was immediately aware that this was about to be a very long day. Thankfully the drive over to the airport flew by, with the roads near enough empty.

Attending the game, I was fortunate not to have to worry about which team of experts BT would deploy to ensure that nobody watching on TV was able to enjoy a single second of coverage. Thankfully, both Joe Cole and Glenn Hoddle were spotted on the plane over, with a certain Steve McManaman in tow.

Arriving in Madrid, it was nice to be created by some glorious Spanish Sun. Both times we’ve played Madrid, there’s been a strange gap in the weather where the temperature has dropped dramatically on the game by several degrees. With this in mind, I disappointingly opted for jeans over shorts.

These European Aways are always strange in the sense that you often end up only seeing a very specific part of the city. Between heading to the hotel, collecting match day tickets and then meeting other Chelsea fans, I can’t help but feel that the capital of Spain probably had a lot more to offer than what we saw.

Dad and I found a small, very traditional Spanish bar which served what we came for… crisp, cool Cerveza’s. Something about a nice foreign beer served in a cooled glass just hits different. Each beer came with a variety of Spanish bread, meats and cheese. All for a very reasonable price too. Six beers and their accompanying snacks came to a grand total of just £14. Sadly this was then followed up by one of the worst pizzas I’ve ever had across the road as my head began to feel the effects of its 4am wake up and a general lack of hydration throughout the morning.

Once again Plaza Mayor, what is almost certainly a wonderful city square on most days, played host to the majority of Chelsea fans who had made the trip with everyone congregating in one corner of the square.

Chelsea fans were in pretty good spirits, and how could they not be? After all this was the knockout European away game under Frank Lampard that we’d been robbed off due to covid a few years back.

The slightly modified and recycled Frank Lampard chant was in full flow too. “We’ve got Super Frankie Lampard. He knows exactly what we need. Thiago at the back. No one in attack. Chelsea gonna win the Champions League.”

As much as it would’ve been nice to be able to chant for one of our attacking players within this, last night performance confirmed that none of these players deserve any such recognition and I’ll be quite happy for that chant to stay as it is until further additions can be made come summer.

I was standing half under a large canopy outside the bar when I felt something lightly hit my shoulder. Next thing I knew I had Andy in my ear telling me I’d just been pooed on by a devious local Pigeon. I was told not to worry by Cammy, apparently this was a sign of good luck. Hmmm. Thankfully all evidence of said bird poo was erased thanks to a lengthy supply of tissue and losing bet slips found in my wallet.

Around three hours before kick off, the Spanish police had eventually had enough of the travelling Chelsea faithful and all pubs and bars within the corner of the square were ordered to shut without further notice. Fortunately, such rules didn’t apply on the opposite side of the square. So we simply moved there.

Given Dad currently has a broken foot, we opted to travel in the relative comfort of a local Madrid taxi and upon arriving at the Bernabeu I was slightly disappointed by the lack of progress all round on renovations of the stadium. The current phase of the project seems to have involved wrapping the stadium in curved metal sheets but once you pass beyond these you have the old exterior of the stadium waiting anyway.

The process to get in was pretty tiresome, each ticket had your passport number attached to it and this was checked at least three times getting into the ground which would’ve made it nearly impossible for any ticketless folk to get in.

Even more concerning was the lack of renovations in the away end concourse. All that had changed from last time was the addition of some new toilets, which in fairness weren’t awful, but I do think that exactly 12 months to the day should’ve been enough time to turn the small section into a bit less of a building site.

In the stand itself, a fair few seats had been installed further up and the retractable roof appears to be nearing completion. It has a wonderful feel to it inside and the character which comes from each stand being so different and all over the place cannot be matched from the new build stadiums we see popping up all over the place now.

As far as your view in the stadium goes, the Bernabeu is seriously impressive. Being on a relatively small site, in order to bring in as many fans as possible the stands are frighteningly steep with there being almost zero room in front of your seats for people to pass by.

There is a real lack of away game culture in Spain, with few people travelling across the country to follow their teams. As a result, the away end was pretty small, and tucked up in highest point of the ground which led to the players appearing like pin pricks down below.

As with last year, the Madrid fans produced a Tifo which was unsuccessfully deployed as it got caught on something on the way down. Whilst I haven’t been impressed with the noise their fans made on both visits, it was hard to not be in awe as ‘Hala Madrid’ boomed around the stadium pre-game.

Chelsea started the game well enough and Joao Felix latched onto an inch-perfect pass from Enzo Fernández just a couple of minutes in. Whilst he was able to test Courtois, he spent too long with the ball at his feet and that allowed a Madrid defender time to force him further wide. I find myself incredibly frustrated once again with Felix and a £20 million loan fee for two singular goals is simply not good enough. That being said, I will not be surprised whatsoever when management inevitably spend the Mason Mount transfer fee on an £80 million+ bid for this player.

Raheem Sterling his partner in crime up top, was totally ineffective and again lingered for far too long with the ball at his feet. Despite being deployed in a different role, it was hard not to compare him to the effectiveness of Vinicius Junior for Real Madrid. The pace and directness of Vinicius was a frightening sight to behold and it would be a crime not to trying deploying Mudryk next Tuesday in a slightly similar role.

I do have some worries about Raheem. I don’t think he’s been helped by nearly everyone around him being useless all season, but he’s only 27 and should be entering the prime years of his career. I can’t help but think that he could be a classic example of someone who has played too much football too young in his career and is beginning to burn out already. Nevertheless, let’s see how he gets on next year.

The formation certainly didn’t help us going forward given there was no real focal point to any of our attacks. Time after time we would get the ball on the edge of the area and be looking for a presence in the box that was never going to come. If we’re to stand any chance of winning next week we simply have to deploy Havertz as a number 9.

Strangely, I couldn’t help but be annoyed at Romelu Lukaku as we were watching the game. I knew the performance, and complete incompetence in front of goal would once again bring questions as to how no place could be found for him in the squad. Ultimately thought, he missed a few guilt-edged chances in this fixture last year, and his ego is what’s stopped us having any recognisable threat up top in the squad at this point in time.

Whilst I’ve seen Kepa being criticised at length online, I do think this is pretty harsh and I thought he played well last night. He did well to initially save the header which led to their first goal and generally looked pretty composed for any shots on his goal, claiming the ball well a few times. Real Madrid were always going to score in this game, we knew that going into it in all honesty, and the fact we were once again unable to score is unforgivable.

Thiago Silva slotted back into the team effortlessly despite his lengthy absence from the team and I thought Kalidou Koulibaly put in one of his best performances in the shirt. His departure due to injury was noted almost immediately as Marc Cucurella left Ben Chilwell with an incredibly difficult situation to deal with. He made the wrong choice, and was deservedly handed a red card for his wrongdoing but realistically he shouldn’t have been put in the position to do it.

N’Golo Kanté has come back into the side like he never left. Showing everyone why he’s one of the best midfielders of the last decade. Praying he stays for another year, or two would be fine.

On the other side of the pitch, Reece James looks a shadow of the player we saw earlier in the season and in previous years. I’ve heard rumours of a hamstring that needs operating on and if this is indeed the case, his season needs to come to an end as soon as possible. Vinicius had the beating of him several times and it really looked like he had nothing more to give in that aspect having previously dominated him several times. Wesley Fofana did a good job covering him on a number of these occasions.

With 80 minutes gone, we were left with the choice of leaving the ground at 2-0 or watching the remaining 10 minutes before being held back in the ground for an hour. Needless to say, we chose the former. As did half of the away end.

It seems a shame to have left the ground before the game had concluded, but the temperature had begun to drop and having experienced a police horse escort into literally the middle of nowhere last year, I really didn’t feel like repeating this ordeal.

Last year, as soon as we left the ground we were surrounded on every side by police on horseback. Anyone who tried to break out of this was then chased down by the police and returned to formation. After what felt like an eternity, but was probably around 20 minutes, the police vanished. Leaving the 1,800 Chelsea fans to make their own way back to their hotels. All in all, a very inconvenient affair.

Thankfully the hotel was a brisk 30 minute walk from the Stadium which took even less with so many of the crowd in the stadium. There was time for one more Cerveza in a local bar and then it was off to bed. Having been up for nearly 20 hours at this point, I was ready for it.

Yesterday could’ve been so much worse from a scoreline perspective and crucially, we’re somehow still not completely out of the tie. Make no mistake about it, Stamford Bridge will need to be absolutely rocking next Tuesday if we’re to stand any chance of getting something out of the game but it’s not impossible.

There aren’t really a huge number of positives to take from yesterday’s game. It’s worrying to think that our season will be over in all likelihood this time next week. We really do need some of these players to step up and be the players they were bought to be. If not, all we will really have to look forward to is a possible chance to rain on Arsenal’s title parade in a couple of weeks time.

All in all, this will probably be the last European away trip we have for some time thanks to our horrendous domestic form. In the event we do turn around yesterday’s scoreline somehow then a trip up north to Manchester is looking likely for next round which isn’t an entirely exciting thought.

Anyway, onto Brighton Saturday. Let’s hope it’s better than our trip to the Amex in October.