Ken Early: Baiting managers just another Spanish bloodsport

The day after a massive Real Madrid defeat is always the best time to consult the pro-Real Madrid Spanish press. "The Bernabéu demands heads" was the cover splash on Spain's biggest-selling daily, Marca. The sports papers rooted through the entrails of Madrid's 4-0 defeat with unmistakable relish. Not for nothing is Madrid the home of the world's most famous bloodsport.

The bulls are not the only creatures who can be tortured for mass entertainment. If Real Madrid can’t win, solace can always be found in the ancient sports of manager-baiting and scapegoat-hunting.

Only four months after taking the Madrid job, Rafael Benítez already looks as doomed as the unfortunate water buffalo from the closing sequences of Apocalypse Now.

Marca accused Benítez of playing his cards so close to his chest that in the end even he couldn't see what was on them. Apparently, he had tried out several starting line-ups in training, but only told the players who was actually playing an hour before the game.

“More than one of them was astounded by what had happened,” Marca reported. The fact that more than one Real Madrid star was “astounded” to have been asked to play against Barcelona tells you the kind of dressing room Benítez is dealing with.

Sacrificed principles

Last week Benítez was criticised for being too defensive. Now he is criticised for being too attacking. Uncharacteristically, he had chosen a front six featuring no natural defensive midfielder. It looked as though he had picked a team to please the president, Florentino Pérez. He had sacrificed his principles to keep his job, and would probably end up losing both.

Benítez’s detractors usually say that they don’t like his style of football, but one suspects it’s really Benítez himself that they don’t like. He’s cold, businesslike, almost aggressively unstylish – the opposite of the sort of glamorous, smouldering figure who ought to be leading Real Madrid in the imagination of many supporters. Remember, this is the club that didn’t sign Ronaldinho because, according to someone close to Pérez, he was “so ugly that he’d sink you as a brand”.

Ronaldinho went to Barcelona instead and ended up receiving a standing ovation at the Bernabéu after he scored two brilliant goals to inspire a 3-0 away win. On Saturday it was Andrés Iniesta who was applauded from the field by the home support, who spent the rest of the night abusing the home team. The behaviour of the Madrid crowd was reminiscent of what had happened at the World Cup semi-final in Belo Horizonte, when the Brazilian supporters turned on their players during the 7-1 defeat to Germany.

The Brazilians had applauded Germany’s seventh goal and sarcastically cheered German passes while savagely barracking their own team. The message could not have been clearer: look what you’ve made us do. You had to feel sorry for Marcelo, the only player to have been on the receiving end both times.

The Brazilians in Belo Horizonte vented at the country's president, Dilma Rouseff. Madrid's fans likewise called for the head of their own president. "Florentino, resign!" chanted the Bernabéu. "Florentino, stay!" the Barcelona fans yelled back.

It is true that Pérez has done more than anyone to turn Madrid into an institution that values celebrity over sporting substance. If the fans are hunting for scapegoats, there is none more deserving than Pérez. And yet the ethos he’s tried to impose remains persuasive in its simplicity. The essence of the galáctico idea is that football is all about players, not coaches or gameplans or the rest of the peripheral stuff people get distracted by. Pérez believed that if he brought the best players in the world, success would naturally follow.

The problem is that the best players in the world are all playing for Barcelona. Instead of Neymar, Pérez bought Gareth Bale. Instead of Luis Suárez, Pérez bought James Rodríguez. He picked the wrong galácticos. Meanwhile, Barcelona grafted the greatest front three ever assembled onto the passing machine inherited from the Pep years. Their first goal finished off a sequence of 24 passes, prompting an online proliferation of speeded-up versions of the move, catering to the 21st-century attention span by cramming all 24 passes into just a few seconds.

Fatal gaps

It was in these speeded-up edits that the cleverness of what Barcelona had done could best be appreciated. You could see how they played Real Madrid like an accordion – moving the ball first forward then back, squeezing Madrid’s lines together and then stretching them out, until fatal gaps appeared in the overextended centre. The arrogant flick of Suárez’s right boot that whipped the ball into the net was just the crowning moment of 90 seconds of the best football that you could ever hope to see.

The truth is that no team Madrid had sent out could have stopped Barcelona in this mood. Benítez, Pérez, Ronaldo, Bale: all of them were irrelevant on a night when the only thing that counted was the untouchable quality of Neymar, Suárez, Iniesta and their team-mates. For Madrid to confront that reality honestly would be the bitterest pill of all. No wonder they’d rather amuse themselves with bloodsport.