Remontada, remontada, remontada.
“Honestly, I’ve heard it about a million times since last week,” Jude Bellingham said. No word has been repeated as often inside the dressing room or outside it either: on the front pages of the newspapers, on radio, TV and TikTok, where the Englishman apologetically admitted “I get my education from these days,” or in the “million videos” he has watched. Bound into the mystique of Real Madrid, their never-ending story, it means comeback and it is written; it also means this isn’t over, even when it should be. Or so it goes.
And while it has been consciously created and cumulative, gathering pace as planned over the seven days that followed defeat in London, Bellingham says the belief was back even before they were: in fact, it was already there by the time they boarded the bus. Now it almost feels like it was better to lose the first leg to Arsenal 3-0. He knows that sounds as absurd as it surely is, and was keen to analyse the flaws to be addressed, but this way the second leg is set up to be more epic, more like them. “A night that’s made for Real Madrid,” Bellingham called it, one that “would go down in history but also something people here are familiar with.”
“After the game it’s normally really tough: you’re sitting around on your own and you do think it’s difficult,” the Madrid midfielder admitted. “But the more you get speaking to the other lads and you see how confident they are, the more it rubs off on you. Lads who have lived these nights before. It’s infectious, it makes you a lot more confident, a lot more comfortable about the situation you’re in and the people you’re going into it with. For us, it was pretty much immediate. By the time we were back on the coach we were all … not in good spirits, obviously, but we realised we could still be in the competition.”
“It’s been a weird environment the last few days: it’s one of the worst results we could possibly imagine away and for some reason everyone thinks it’s now done that we will come back.”
Logically, the situation is not good. But Madrid have built a history around defying logic: not just recently, but going all the way back to one night against Derby in 1975, a 5-1 Bernabéu victory overturning a 4-1 defeat at the Baseball Ground. In the 1980s, the epic became their thing, an identity built upon it. Even if the stats show it’s not quite as inevitable as it seems, not quite as tales told it, the stories were told and still are; over these last seven days, especially. “I’ve heard Emilio [Butragueño, the striker who is now a director at the club] talking about the one where they won 6-1 against Anderlecht and I’ve seen the clips,” Bellingham said. “That’s something you want to be part of. You want to add to the history of the club.”
Not that it’s just about the past, or even just about madness, that moment when everyone loses their minds and the impossible takes over. In fact, Madrid’s coach, Carlo Ancelotti, talked instead of the need for control, insisted “there is no magic”; his team require a plan, clear focus, not simply to be carried along by the emotion, the occasion. Borrowing a line from the tennis player Carlos Alcaraz, he called for “cabeza, corazón y cojones”: head, heart and balls.
Bellingham, too, was conscious that things have to change. Asked what they had to be, in purely football terms, he replied: “A lot better than in the first leg, that’s for sure. Higher commitment, a better understanding of what we have to do, cleaner with the ball, better on transitions … there are a multitude of things. There wasn’t one aspect of our game where we were good enough and you have to not be afraid to say that. We know we can do better. It is one thing to lose, another not to learn.”
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In the first leg, Madrid ran 14km less than Arsenal, a simple but significant statistic. “You always give yourself a better chance if you run more, if you match the other team,” Bellingham explained. “14km: that’s, what, one player and a bit. Of course that makes an impact. Last year we didn’t always run the most but we were in an organised position, so there’s an element of knowing which spaces to cover that doesn’t involve running like a headless chicken. It’s finding the balance, a mix we didn’t do well at the Emirates. Hopefully tomorrow we will be willing to run a lot more and have a better plan too.”
When he was told that they hadn’t won a game by more than a solitary goal since February, let alone three of them, Bellingham said simply: “It’s a different night, innit.” Their kind of night.