Kylian Mbappe was clearly not a happy man with Real Madrid manager Alvaro Arbeloa's decision to start Gonzalo Garcia up top at striker over him. Last weekend, Arbeloa had actually planned on starting Garcia over Mbappe against Barcelona in El Clasico, and many Madridistas speculated that this was the real reason why the Frenchman bailed out at the last second of the final training session before the match, not wanting to sit on the bench or face the music of the title decider and be named among those who lost.
Naturally, Garcia and Real Madrid all struggled against a far superior opponent, but with Arbeloa choosing the young Spanish striker, who now has chances of going to the World Cup this summer for Luis de la Fuente after earning a spot in the preliminary squad, to start against Real Oviedo, the real quality was on display against a, well, inferior opponent.
Garcia won the official Man of the Match award, scoring the opener with another clinical finish to add to his solid tally of seven this season despite being a bit player in his first senior season. Perhaps the best accomplishment of the all too brief Xabi Alonso era as Real Madrid manager, Garcia has proven that he is a quality squad player for Real Madrid, even as Los Blancos are rumored to sell.
Gonzalo Garcia deserves better
Kylian Mbappe threw a tantrum at Alvaro Arbeloa to the press after the game after being benched, pretending to sound like the reasonable good guy by invoking Alonso and how he was fired. But for the first time in his career, Arbeloa acted like a real manager and stood tall as a superstar player tried to bully him in a cruel twist of irony, given Mbappe was pretending to be the good guy lamenting Alonso's fate.
Arbeloa retorted at the press conference, via the Madrid Zone, "For me, the player who couldn't even make the bench four days ago, the best thing was for him to play in the second half and to be a starter on Sunday. On top of that, Gonzalo deserved to play today. And as long as I'm sitting in this chair, I'm the one who will decide who plays and who doesn't. If they don't like it, they can wait for the next coach."
Nothing Arbeloa said here is wrong, and if this were a bigger name manager like Zinedine Zidane or Jose Mourinho talking about any other player who doesn't have a cult of personality attached to him like Mbappe, this would be read as a perfectly reasonable response to a disgruntled player.
And lost in all this is poor Gonzalo Garcia. These are his last games to impress before he presumably leaves Real Madrid in the summer. Mbappe could give two craps about Garcia or the other young players at Madrid, so this tirade after the game is really a disrespect to him and the great game he played. But Madridistas should not be so cruel as to forget this. Garcia was the hero.
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