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Journalism of Courage
When Carlo Ancelotti became the Real Madrid manager in 2013, he had two emergency tasks. A) To convince Cristiano Ronaldo to stay at the club. Rumours of a reunion with Manchester United were stewing. B) To unlock the goal-scoring beast in him. Besides, his reluctance to drop back to defend offered swathes of unmanned land for opposite full backs to exploit.
The first task was simple. He sweet-talked his way to make Ronaldo feel wanted at Madrid and put the move on ice. “It will be an honour for me to coach Ronaldo. It will be like it was coaching [Zinedine] Zidane, Ronaldo and Ronaldinho before,” he spoke during his unveiling. The second was a more complex task as it involved moving Ronaldo from his preferred left wing to the central forward role, a move that could also unzip the nippy potential of wingers Angel di Maria and the newly-recruited Gareth Bale.
It required more than cajoling. So the Italian set up the team in such a way that Ronaldo was installed on the left wing but literally functioned as a centre forward with a minor tweak in formation. The deputed centre forward, Karim Benzema would shift to the right, while the right winger Gareth Bale dropped a bit deeper, like a wingback. On the left flank Angel Di Maria marauded into the spaces Ronaldo would normally occupy, organically moving Ronaldo to spaces in the centre. An assistant of his Paul Clement would recount: “They had to adjust everything else to ensure he didn’t have to track his full-back so he played one system offensively and another defensively. It was a lopsided shape that would change to allow Ronaldo to play more advanced.”
The yield was glorious—in 101 games he netted 112 goals and tallied 47 assists. Ronaldo the fizzy winger with snazzy feints and step-overs transformed into a less showboater voracious centre forward. He later thanked Ancelotti for the metamorphosis that made him a goal colossus of the game. “He is a genius. He makes great players,” Ronaldo ould wax eloquent.
The Italian with affable manners and monikered teddy bear, makes players great too. Twelve years after he steered Ronaldo towards the path of goal-scoring Everest, he encountered a similar challenge. To guide Kylian Mbappe to the path of greatness. The Frenchman, like the Portuguese, descended on the hallowed Bernabéu turf as a future great, already famous and expensive. Ancelotti already had Vinicius Junior, of dizzying talent and unflappable energy, on the left wing where Mbappe devastates with his explosive pace, the blinding cutbacks, well-weighted passes, and whiplash right-foot swing cutting inside. Or precisely all the things that Vinicius Junior does. Mbappe, thus, disrupted the careful balance of Madrid. Jude Bellingham, who played centrally in a free role, now had to move deeper into the midfield, his liberty inhibited. This was Mbappe’s impediment at PSG as well, with Neymar prowling Mbappe’s preferred spaces.
This time, though, Ancelotti did tweak the entire system to suit Mbappe. He did not change Vinicius’s flank, because he reasoned that he “doesn’t want to change the player that makes the difference.” Instead, he persisted with Mbappe as the focal point of the forward. When a journalist once queried him whether the No 9 role suits, Ancelotti replied in jest: “I can’t teach him anything about being a striker. Maybe he can teach me.” Goals came at a trickle, shuffling Bellingham to the midfield diminished his goal-scoring output. Rodrygo, the right-sided forward was repurposed into a winger. The ripple effect of Mbappe signing destabilised Madrid in the early days.
Criticism mounted, pundits and former players questioned both Ancelotti’s insistence and Mbappe’s labours. But Ancelotti struck his fabled easy-go poise. He knew Mbappe was too good to languish, too un-hubristic to wage a cold war using his player-power, but impossibly ambitious to establish his greatness in the most famous white robes in football. As the season wore on, Mbappe prospered and hit high notes in the hat-trick against Manchester City, operating as a classical centre forward in a 4-4-2, beating City’s off-side with ease (an aspect he had struggled against Barcelona in the first El Clasico), sprinting into spaces behind the defenders, working hard off the ball and wearing those exquisite goal-scoring boots with prominently high collars. He had only five shots on goals, three of them shook the nets. The hat-trick goal was his 17th in 18 games. He received the ball on the right wing, darted past a bevy of defenders and spat the ball goal-wards with a left-footed strike.
In the press conference, he stressed on his prowess to occupy any role in the forward line. “I said the first day I came here that I can play in every position: right, left, centre, in a two; I don’t mind. Today I played in a different position to the last game and in the next game I might play in a different position again,” he would say. Other subtle layers of his game too shone. Like his tracking back, which the manager was concerned about. His pressing was relentless and off-the-ball industry displayed his eagerness to fulfil the predestined greatness. His manager would compliment, saying he has “the quality to reach Cristiano’s level.” “He has to work, because Cristiano has set the limit very high. For the quality, for the illusion he has, he can reach Cristiano’s level, but it’s not going to be easy, he has to work,” he elaborated.
Gradually, every other post-Mbappe tactic too fell into place and Madrid rediscovered their sting and sprite. At the heart of the renaissance is Ancelotti, the man who uncorked the goal-scoring monster in Ronaldo, and the man that has revived Mbappe in Madrid.
