La Liga day 25: Malaga 1-1 Real Madrid, Atletico 0-0 Villareal.
Barcelona put pressure on Saturday after winning 2-1 at Las Palmas, and had a 10 points lead over Real Madrid. In a must win situation Zidane’s men did not perform well after their victory at AS Roma. They dropped two points and are 9 points behind Barcelona, which in this league and with “only” 13 matches left seems impossible to overcome. Next game is a major for Real Madrid as they will face their Madrid rivals and whoever lose this game will probably have abandoned any hopes to be crowned in late Spring.
Zidane comments on a sluggish performance:
“Today we dropped two points, but we’ll never throw the towel in. There are still a lot of points to play for, there are 38 points to play for, and we’re going to keep going. It was a difficult game. We’re not going to relax, for me there’s no such thing. We’ve got La Liga and the Champions League and we’re going to fight right until the end.
There are points at stake and there’s still a long way to go in the Liga season. The other teams can drop points, but I’m not thinking about the other teams. I’m just thinking about us carrying on regardless of what happens. We prepared well during the week and I’m going to have to analyse the game. The players put a lot of effort in today. The game was there to be won and it’s true that they fashioned a lot of chances against us.
I don’t think that we didn’t play well. We struggled a bit, particularly with the second balls. They dominated in many areas, but we didn’t play badly. We had many chances. “Today you might look at it and think that we played badly and I might think the opposite: that we had chances to score and win the game. We could perhaps also have lost the game.Our last few games give us reason for optimism”.
Atletico did not prepare well also the coming clash in Champions League at PSV Eindhoven with a scoreless tie at home.
