Real Madrid playmaker Jude Bellingham admitted the team were not good enough defensively against Stuttgart.
The Germans scored again, forcing Thibaut Courtois to make six saves. The England midfielder explained that this was a “new look” Real Madrid, and that he was still a work in progress.
Bellingham felt their pressure was broken too easily by Stuttgart, as he told TNT Sport.
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“We gave away far too many chances but once they got past our first line of pressure they always seemed to cause us problems.”
“We’ve changed a few things, the loss of Toni is huge in terms of rhythm and the way he plays, he’s such a special player, he’s irreplaceable, but we’re going to have to find a lot of new ways to try and fill him,” he said, before stressing that it was positive that they were able to win without playing at their best.
His coach, Carlo Ancelotti, told the media after the match that he had never won a Champions League without suffering, but the speed with which Stuttgart broke through Real Madrid’s midfield had his players booed at the Santiago Bernabéu.
“It was difficult for us to recover, they managed the ball very well, for us to touch the ball we had to stay compact because they played very well with the ball,” Ancelotti explained.
“It depends on what you choose to do. We chose to play vertically, and we had a lot of chances. When we were 1-0 up, we had two or three counterattacks. Fluidity is when you have the ball, but when you have the attackers that we have, we have to, we try to play more vertically.”
“You have to choose between building or playing vertically. Sometimes the coach chooses to play vertically. If we build, we don’t score the first goal, which was scored by a vertical ball from Tchouameni. We have very fast attackers.”
“We have to work more on defensive construction, today we had a little more trouble in the first half. But we have to get closer to the opponent’s goal as quickly as possible.”
As Relevo points out, Carlo Ancelotti had asked the Madrid media to re-evaluate his squad in five weeks at the start of the season, as they had not done a pre-season. But Los Blancos are still struggling to find solutions to their problems.
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