Chronicle: Madrid beat Celta like the scorpion
Zidane. "Lucas is very from Madrid"
A bad game or an unpleasant substitution were never going to be worse than that night in the summer of 2019, when the cracking of the knee was followed by the worst medical prediction.
Faced with the dark corridor of months of recovery,
Marco Asensio
burst into tears in the United States, where his promising career suffered a hiatus from which now, it seems, is beginning to come out completely.
Last Saturday at
Di Stéfano
, at 11:30 p.m. and with 1 degree of Navajo cold, the smile would not go away despite being still in shorts.
Leaning her back against the concrete, she waited her turn for post-game interviews.
Lucas Vázquez, his partner on the field and also a prominent player in the 2-0 win against Celta, was ahead.
Both scorers, the first assistant to the second.
A shy laugh was brought out by the club employee who reminded him that just as the Galician was the footballer with the most European Cups in the history of his land, he would be from
Mallorca
, with two.
"Sure!", He replied cheerfully, but without hiding that his mind was elsewhere then, perhaps in the recent past, in that recovery of weeks and weeks that ended in June but from which he has not completely escaped.
His good performances lately, starting and decisive in the field, are recovering for the football scene the wonder boy who in 2017 marked in each final that Madrid played and placed balls in the
Barça
squad
with his left-handed silk and steel.
A month ago, without going any further, his star was fading in the middle of the team's ugly results crisis.
He did not hit the key, present only his name on the grass, not his differential game.
An
Asensio
without spark, nor overflow;
an Asensio of the lot that made things difficult for the confidence of
Zinedine Zidane
, his coach and great defender.
From crisis to take off
"He did not sink, but he did become very discouraged," they acknowledge from the locker room, where they point to its closest core as vitamin D from which it has drawn energy to avoid being defeated by the bad winds that sometimes hit even talents capital letters like him.
His girlfriend, his physical trainer (José), his father, his manager ... They all made pineapple to cheer him on.
When things have gone badly for him, his environment and also the club have offered him professional psychological help, without ever having accepted this route.
The loss of his mother when he was only a teenager (15 years old) and the management of the enormous expectations that from very early on in sports have forged the character of a boy much more mentally tough, according to his people, than what sometimes it seems in the field.
Those bad afternoons weeks ago, without weight in the games, were the fault of the lack of physical and mental filming that was still missing.
In November, when he returned with the national team, he confessed that he still had a way to go to reach his most refined version.
Now, despite the flashes that he is already leaving (decisive against
Granada
and
Celta
), he continues to warn that he still needs more time to round off his state of form, although the sensations, that essential cooking point in the players (and bullfighters) of art, are getting better and better.
The opportunities that ZZ is giving him, between injuries (
Rodrygo
) of some and slow recoveries of others (Hazard), are the ideal take-off track for the insular striker who will turn 25 at the end of the month and who continues to be one of the pieces strategies of the white club.
It also appears that he is helping to emphasize his position on the left, where his left-hander has produced two assists.
"It is a long process, I knew it was going to cost, but in the end you accumulate minutes and the results are already being seen," says
Asensio
, ambitious for 2021. He has the
Eurocup
in his sights
and, why not, the
Tokyo Olympics
, where you could also go.
That in the medium term, because another mission is urgent first: to establish itself as the destabilizing footballer that Madrid needs to fight for the titles.
According to the criteria of The Trust Project
Know more
Zinedine Zidane
Marco Asensio
Majorca
Pomegranate
U.S
Eden Hazard
soccer
First division
Real MadridThe old trick that works again for Zidane
LaLigaAsensio liquidates an exemplary Granada
LaLigaVinicius: "You had to suffer to win"
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