It truly is rare to see a football player so overcome with anger he explicitly describes what has gone wrong for his team. After Real Madrid fell 5-3 on aggregate in the Champions League to Ajax, Dani Carvajal held nothing back.
“We’ve had a shi**y season,” the Spanish fullback said in the spin zone at the Santiago Bernabéu on Tuesday night. Dani is spot on here as Los Blancos have lost three straight matches at home to fall out of three separate competitions.
Not only did Real lose consecutive matches to rival FC Barcelona in both the Copa del Rey and La Liga without scoring, but Madrid also bombed out of the competition they have owned for the last decade or so.
A young Ajax team captained by a 19-year-old that had not beaten Real Madrid in seven meetings came into the Spanish capital and blew the doors off a poor looking team. To be quite honest, the side from Amsterdam deserved to win the first leg but were unlucky not to find the back of the net in the first half.
Carvajal was one of the few Madrid players to make such brash comments post-match and he was right in doing so.
“I don’t see this as the end of a cycle,” he went on to say. “We have a young team, but the margin for improvement is enormous; we have to face that and not shy away.”
Ajax took the lead inside a half hour and never looked back. After both Lucas Vazquez and Vinícius Júnior were forced off before halftime with injury, it seemed the energy left the building and the energy left the players as well.
A couple of close shots in the first half from Raphael Varane and Nacho Fernandez scared the young Dutch side, but in the end, it was nothing more than a warning. Had VAR made a different call on the third Ajax goal and those two players hadn’t been hurt so early on, Los Blancos would likely be onto yet another quarterfinal.
Carvajal finished his tirade saying, “In one week, we’ve lost everything. We can’t look for excuses tonight. Our opponent was better than us and deserved to progress.”
Santiago Solari clearly has no place as the boss at such a high-profile club and this summer will bring up a lot of questions just like last year’s. I think Dani Carvajal is one of the players within this squad who can revitalize the players and give fans hope for the future.
Let’s hope more players show this kind of anger with how this season has transpired. It has been one to forget.