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#2 Tired midfield
In the first-half, especially in the opening stages of the game, Madrid’s midfield completely overran their rivals. The Barca midfield seemed nonexistent to the Galacticos’ fury. As mentioned above, Kovacic, in particular, put in a great shift.
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They were relentlessly pressing the Barca players while the latter were just absorbing it with patience. They knew that the Merengues couldn’t continue this for the whole game and that eventually, they would tire out.
And they did. In the second half, when Ivan Rakitic made the run from midfield that would eventually lead to Barca’s first goal, the Madrid midfielders were too slow to close him down and had to pay the price for it.
This was the theme of the entire half and it only got worse when Carvajal’s red card. After that, the Galacticos were on the backfoot, so much so that even the substitutes Gareth Bale and Marco Asensio couldn’t do much about anything.
