Xabi Alonso appears to have found an unlikely saviour at Real Madrid, with Vinicius Junior saving the head coach’s skin.
Ahead of the Champions League clash against Manchester City on Wednesday, the message was clear from the Spanish media: failure to win would mean Alonso would lose his job.
A 2-1 defeat later and the Spaniard – for now – finds himself still in charge at the Bernabeu, with the press looking at Vinicius Junior instead as their scapegoat for that loss.
It is, of course, an ironic turn of events. One of the chief reasons that Alonso finds himself under pressure in Madrid just six months after arriving at the club from Bayer Leverkusen is that his relationship with the Brazilian has been poor.
Vini Jr publicly questioned his new boss when he was substituted in El Clasico while behind the scenes made it clear that he will not sign a new contract with the club while Alonso is still in charge. It is pressure that president Florentino Perez appears ready to bow to.
And yet the 25-year-old winger now finds himself in the firing line after the midweek loss against City. It was a match that Madrid performed largely well in, yet Vini’s wasteful finishing was one of the major reasons they failed to take at least a point.
Despite pressure towards the end of the game, Alonso watched his side muster just a single shot on target against City. This came via Rodrygo ending his long goal drought by scoring his first goal under his new boss.
Otherwise, Real Madrid had 15 shots, one of which hit the woodwork, eight of which were blocked and seven of which failed to hit the target.
It was a night, as AS declared, that the squad showed they are with Alonso.
From four shots worth a total of 0.6xG, he failed to find the target even once, missing two big chances in the process. He completed just 13 passes all night with an accuracy of a feeble 59%, with this figure dropping to just 27% in the final third of the park.
The net effect of all this is that Vini Jr’s performance has seen criticism directed towards the player and not the manager.
Perez, too, finds himself in the firing line for placing the Brazilian’s importance ahead of that of Alonso.
“It might have been outrageous to tell Sergio Ramos: ‘You’re going to renew for this, so renew now. And if you don’t renew now, forget about it.’ Well, it might have been outrageous, but Real Madrid came before the player,” Champions League-winning goalkeeper Santiago Canizares told ABC.
“How many problems of this kind have there been at Barcelona? How many seasons have Barcelona failed to meet their objectives because of this type of management?”
Canizares is not alone in this type of criticism aimed towards Real Madrid and their treatment of Vini Jr.
“You can’t let an idiot like Vinicius be in charge at Real Madrid,” journalist Federico Jimenez Losantos emphatically told Herlado earlier this week.
On what was supposed to be the night fell on Xabi Alonso, it instead seem to be, as AS described it, a positive turning point for the coach as the spotlight instead fell on the misfiring Vini Jr.
