The Chelsea team is already talking about how they can do it, how it has been done before. After all, recent Champions League seasons have seen far bigger comebacks than those required by Thomas Tuchel’s side to overcome a 3-1 deficit at Real Madrid. He has been pointing out the lessons of some of them in their preparations, where the players have accelerated.
In that sense, Tuchel’s harsh words on Wednesday that the tie was not alive have served their purpose. The team has been irritated.
They immediately responded with one of their most ravenous displays of the season, a 6-0 destruction of Southampton. That is the spirit with which they now arrive at the Bernabéu. It makes a huge difference to how they finished the first leg at Stamford Bridge.
Tuchel himself inevitably changed his tone. Where he had been sorry, he is now recovering.
The Chelsea manager said his players must not “accept” elimination, and that they can do so “leaving everything we have on the pitch”.
“We know that we can take more risks and that we show our true colors … it is a beauty of the game that everything is possible, always,” he added.
The past few years have shown that it is especially possible when teams don’t just see a comeback as an immense task to be scaled. They need to go step by step, especially since each step profoundly changes the state of the game.
This is something Tuchel has been telling his players.
Chelsea, after all, need a 3-0 win at the Bernabeu to get through, a feat that would normally seem “impossible”, as the manager put it.
However, the whole feeling changes if they can get a goal to make it 3-2 on aggregate. So it’s not about something as big as winning 3-0 at the Bernabéu. It’s just about getting the next goal after that. It becomes easy to visualize.
This is how Madrid played it when they came back from 2-0 against Paris Saint-Germain. This was articulated by Ole Gunnar Solskjaer before Manchester United’s comeback against the same team.
Kai Havertz scored Chelsea’s goal in their 3-1 first-leg loss at Stamford Bridge
(AP)
It is the only way to achieve such a feat, as Jurgen Klopp found against Barcelona in 2019.
This is what Tuchel meant when he said that Chelsea must have “a game where the belief grows within the game through our actions”.
However, there is a major complication to such a plan. That is not Madrid, not even the psychological challenge of doing this in this great stadium, as Tuchel referred to.
“It is one of the biggest challenges to play as an away team at the Bernabéu,” said the Chelsea manager. “And it’s even more difficult if you have to get a certain result, if you need to win with a minimum of two goals, or even with a difference of three goals.”
Recent years have shown that elite footballers should no longer be intimidated by these types of images. We are in a new world. It’s one of the reasons UEFA got rid of the away goal rule.
It should also come as some consolation to Chelsea that Madrid scored three at Stamford Bridge, without those goals meaning what they used to.
The biggest complication, however, is the author of those goals.
Benzema scored all three of his team’s goals as Real Madrid won 3-1 in west London last week.
(AP)
Karim Benzema is in the kind of career where he can undo any game plan in a moment. He can easily make Chelsea have to get four or even five here. It’s an immense challenge to stop it on its own, especially when you’re chasing game.
Benzema’s goals in the first leg ensured that he became only the second player after Cristiano Ronaldo to score hat-tricks in consecutive Champions League knockout matches. That’s symbolic, as it looks like he’s finally putting it on a similar plane to those greats.
He is certainly having one of his seasons, and has been the dominant player this entire Champions League campaign so far.
That raises bigger questions about his career, beyond whether he can actually deliver the trophy itself.
This level of performance, after all, is precisely the kind of impact people imagined when they saw Benzema rampaging through defenses as a young player at Lyon. It was the career he was supposed to have.
After all, no one imagines these child prodigies as sideshows. They are supposed to be the main event.
This does not mean that it was wrong for Benzema to support Ronaldo, since we were talking about one of the best players of all time. It is to wonder what his career might have been if he were the focal point, as he is now.
Nobody could say this about his achievements, of course. Benzema has won four Champions Leagues and is now on his way to a fourth Spanish title. It is more about his brand of such achievements, and whether he could have had more of his own victories.
Benzema’s hat-trick in the first leg was the second in as many Champions League knockout games
(AFP/Getty)
It is undeniably crucial to a player’s legacy. Diego Maradona has far fewer medals than a great like Paolo Maldini, for example, but one of the reasons his World Cup is considered bigger than such loot was because of the way the Argentine defined such glory. That makes a difference. It’s not just about the numbers. It’s also about the feel.
This does not mean that Benzema is at the level of Maradona, of course. But we are talking about a modern great, which leads to the second question from last week.
Has Benzema always been so good or has he gone to another level?
Contradictory as those two points sound, many people who know the 34-year-old insist he is a bit of both.
The talent, after all, has always been there. It was only limited so that Benzema could work in a more collective role. We weren’t looking at the full release of his abilities, or a player able to max them out. He was doing other jobs, although he was naturally doing them very well.
Benzema no longer depends on anyone else. “We depend on Benzema”, as Carlo Ancelotti said on Monday.
That has freed up his game and his talent, but some Madrid sources insist there has been a multiplier effect. It’s as if being “the leader” has gotten even more out of him, as if he revels in responsibility.
The Bernabéu will look at Benzema on Tuesday. Chelsea won’t be able to look past him. They have to attack but figure out how to keep it quiet at the same time. It requires going step by step, towards an adequate plan.
“We don’t need anything more than a fantastic script,” said Tuchel. Madrid could have the tie’s lead actor and box office star from him.
Reference-www.independent.co.uk