Lionel Messi: “I don’t know if I’ll be at the 2026 World Cup”.
Real Madrid clearly had no strength to compete with Barcelona last Sunday in the final of the Spanish Supercup. It is rightly, that everyone of the humiliation that a team that is losing momentum even before the World Cup Qatar 2022, and continues to sink. But the captain of the ship Carlo Ancelotti, refuses to see this defeat as a humiliation.
Indeed, after his comments on Movistar +, Carlo Ancelotti was in a press conference where he did the analysis of the game and was forced to answer some questions he did not like. And one of them is the one related to the term humiliation used by the media, given the face displayed by your team last Sunday.
What do you think of the game? I think that the mistakes we made at the beginning of the game, where they looked for us, changed the game. We made unfair mistakes, it was a bad game for all of us. When we tried to recover, we were bad.”
Was it a beating, a humiliation? “It’s disrespectful to say that, we lost to Barca, we beat them in La Liga. They played better and deserved it, period.”
How bad is the team physically? “Taking into account the mistakes we made, Barcelona played better. Complete stop.”
The moment of the team is critical… “It’s a complicated moment, difficult, as it usually is in a season. You usually have it. It’s a difficult moment that we have to deal with with commitment, quickly, with the same attitude as always.”
What are you worried about? “When you concede three goals, you have to get better defensively.”
Can it be a turning point? It is true that the team’s moment is not good. We have to hang in there. This team has the qualities to be competitive again. We are very injured, Madrid usually wins the finals. But there is still a lot of season and we will play until the end. It’s not in my head to talk about humiliation, it’s too much. In sports, sometimes you win and sometimes you get beaten.”
How do you handle childish mistakes? The players have to realize that these mistakes are easy to avoid. Up to that point, each team had only one chance. In these games, if you get ahead, the victory is closer. It was the opposite in La Liga.”
Was there a lack of intensity? “The team had little intensity, little precision, they had 25 turnovers in the first half. They were not very convincing in the face-offs. It was an incomplete game in every way.”
How do you solve this problem? We have to get our heads up soon, think about what we’re going to do. What we’re going to do is get back to a competitive, energetic attitude. It’s the defensive aspect that is costing us the most right now.”
How is the locker room? The team is hurting, a lot. We usually win the finals. But we have all the resources to get better, to hang in there. To have more of everything. Madrid will come back, I have no doubt.”