Nineteen days later, Real Madrid fly back to Lisbon to try again. For all the drama, for all that Benfica’s goalkeeper Anatoliy Trubin rose through the rain to head an astonishing 98th-minute goal and José Mourinho raced up the line with his arms around a ballboy, everyone in the Estádio da Luz losing their minds; for all that Álvaro Arbeloa’s team “crashed out” of the top eight, the biggest club of all have a second chance. Which is, of course, the way the Champions League is designed. So here they go again and things are better now. But they thought that back then, too.
What followed, as one headline had it, was a “total write-off”, Madrid not just beaten 4-2 but battered. Trubin’s late goal, the moment of the competition, changed everything for Benfica but didn’t really alter Madrid’s fate; already destined for the playoffs, it just deepened the “shame”, in Kylian Mbappé’s words. Three weeks on, they meet again on Tuesday in Lisbon – Madrid against Benfica, Mourinho against “my boy” – with an opportunity to start over, some hope and enthusiasm allowed back in. A little easily perhaps, renewed belief built on not much and yet to withstand a proper test, but there may be something in it.
Since returning from Lisbon, Madrid have won three from three. They head back across the border top of La Liga, albeit with Barcelona playing on Monday night. Some crisis, huh? With Arbeloa insisting on the significance of having midweeks free to work – the “prize” everyone seeks in the Champions League unexpectedly and humiliatingly handed to them by a Copa del Rey exit to second division Albacete instead – in the fortnight following that disaster Madrid have beaten Rayo Vallecano, Valencia and Real Sociedad.
So far, so standard, but Saturday’s victory was a little different, a night of unexpected ease and little suffering against a Real Sociedad team that arrived having not lost any of nine games under Pellegrino Matarazzo. Madrid scored four, the whistles replaced with applause. “Madrid enamour” ran one headline, and if that was inevitable, all too easy on Valentine’s Day, it wasn’t entirely misplaced. “It’s nice when people are on your side, supporting you for 90 minutes,” Fede Valverde said, and that was new.
“We have had weeks when we have swallowed a lot of shit,” Madrid’s captain added. But, he said, the players had “completely deserved it” and it had done them good. If Xabi Alonso’s departure was a release for some, the reprobation from the Bernabéu had brought a reaction, an awareness that they were exposed: accused of getting Alonso the sack, wilfully wasting an opportunity to build something, this was on them now.
“That served to make us grow,” Valverde said of the reaction. “It made us mature, change. We’ve been through bad moments, well deserved. We didn’t win last year and didn’t win this. We had to get our heads down, grow. We knew we had to change things.”
Late on Saturday he could say so. Here was “a hint of spring”, the veteran columnist Santiago Segurola wrote. In the absence of Mbappé, the Frenchman’s knee protected before the tie with Benfica, Gonzalo García scored the opening goal. Vinícius Júnior scored twice, and Valverde got his first of the season, returned to midfield after miserable months at full-back.
Arbeloa, asked whether this was Vinícius at his best at last, happy now in a way he very publicly hadn’t been under Alonso, said: “It’s been like that since I have been here.” There was a significant role played by Trent Alexander-Arnold too, another source of optimism. Starting for the first time in 73 days, he made a wonderful pass to set up the first for García. “A caramelo,” the striker called it: a sweetie waiting to be gobbled up. “It was hard to miss,” García said. Look at the photo just before the goal and it doesn’t look like a chance, nothing on, but Alexander-Arnold’s long curling delivery opened an unseen path. “Trent’s strike of the ball simplifies everything,” AS wrote. “It’s so easy when you have a specialist of this calibre, a passer of lethal precision,” El País said.
Alexander-Arnold has, everyone agreed, a “glove on his foot”. The kind of delivery, in other words, so good it was as if he had picked up the ball and put it down again in just the right place. “Madrid took Trent’s route,” Marca’s headline ran. Inside, they asked whether David Beckham was back at the Bernabéu. Trent had come out of his “hiding place”, Sergio López wrote in AS, going all Beatles on him: “From Help to Here Comes the Sun, he emerges from the long, dark tunnel. Yesterday, after such a long time, his troubles seemed so far away.”
This was Alexander-Arnold’s second assist: his first had come the last time he started, against Athletic at San Mamés. That night, though, he sustained his second muscle tear of the season. Before Saturday he had played 16% of the minutes; if he can stay fit, the hope is that he can provide a different dimension.
“I’m not going to say he surprised me but I’ve seen a very intelligent lad who understands the game well,” Arbeloa said. “He’s not the typical full-back who opens the pitch wide, but instead comes inside to play. When we win the ball he can release us. We spoke about it: with Gonzalo in the team, he can find solutions with those balls in. He’s a great player and we’re lucky to have him.”
All was well again, which perhaps requires a word of warning. Two of Madrid’s four were penalties – their 12th and 13th of the season in La Liga – and in both cases Vinícius had looked for them, the second especially. Real Sociedad came off the back of the Copa del Rey semi-final exhausted and with injuries and suspensions, five starters not beginning at the Bernabéu. And although Madrid scored despite the absence of Mbappé, a nagging feeling remained: absurd though it sounds when he has scored 38, some wondered whether “despite” may not be the word. A reminder: when they scored five against Betis recently he was missing too.
And there’s the other thing, another reminder. Although one headline insisted a “state of optimism has been declared”, Madrid have been here before. Their five league wins in a row under Arbeloa are actually eight: Alonso won too. He lost two in 19, and his last league game was that 5-1 victory over Betis. Under him, Madrid reached the final of the Spanish Super Cup having won five in a row and even defeat there strengthened his position because Madrid had at least competed, or so the story went. Less than 24 hours later, he was gone. Arbeloa began with the Copa del Rey defeat, then they faced the whistles against Levante, the most pointed protests in a generation.
But they won three in a row, including a 6-1 battering of Monaco which was a tentative reconciliation, and a 2-0 victory at Villarreal: a genuine test passed, and with something that looked a little like conviction. And then they went to Benfica, seemingly in a better place, and it all fell apart again. Now, they’re back for another go. “I hope history isn’t repeated,” Arbeloa said. “We go there forewarned; it’s very recent and we know how difficult it will be.”
