Tomorrow Lucas Vázquez will begin a new stage in his already long and fruitful career at Real Madrid, where he has accumulated ten seasons in the first team. The Galician winger, recycled in 2019 by Zidane to the right back, has a complicated mission ahead of him: to make people forget for a long period of time. Dani Carvajalby far the best ‘2’ in the world in the last fifteen months.
It is not a new challenge for the white youth player, accustomed to plugging holes since he returned to Madrid in 2015, after a brilliant loan at Espanyol rewarded with his return to the merengue entity. Since then, he has been a regular and exemplary substitute. He has always been there for whatever the group demanded. He played the first five years as a right winger, his natural position, but he also played as a forward and interior player. And for the last five years, he has been at right back, a position monopolized by Carvajal and in which wingers as good as Hakimi have been unable to displace the cucumber player, unusable for the entire season after the serious triple knee injury he suffered two weeks ago against Villarreal.
Lucas, like Nacho, always delivers, but the Galician is much more than one of those wild cards that the coaches know will never let them down. Lucas is from that line of players who, being secondary, are priceless in a squad like that of the Madrid. He has been instilled with values and Real Madrid from a very young age, he feels the shield and the shirt like no one else, he never raises his voice, he does not usually go below a grade and he keeps the quota of Spanish players very much alive, increasingly reduced, but a priceless relevance.
The same Champions League as Barça
He has played 358 games and almost 20,000 minutes in the first team shirt, during which time he has scored 37 goals and given 66 assists. His record is enviable. with 22 titles, including five European Cupsthe same ones that Barcelona has won in its history. Little joke. Champions in which he has left his mark, as happened in the 2016 Milan final, with that penalty that opened the shootout and which he took after playing with the ball in his right hand as if he were a member of the Globetrotters. A story that was repeated in the quarter-final round of the last Champions League, at the Etihadwhen he caught the ball with a juggle with his right foot and nailed it into Ederson’s net. They are the only two penalties he has taken in his career. For what else?
The last two weeks in Valdebebas, Ancelotti has pampered him, knowing that he has some attractive and highly responsible months ahead of him. Until the winter transfer window opens, he is the only right-back in the first team. And, unless there is a new setback in this same position or market opportunity, it may be like this all season. Madrid is not going to sign for the sake of signing, although Ancelotti feels more comfortable with another ‘2’ in the squad. A role that can also be played Militaryas already happened in Porto, or in case of maximum need, one of the two Castilla kids, Lorenzo Aguado and David Jiménez, and the great promise of the Arbeloa Youth, Jesús Fortea, only 17 years old, signed from the quarry of Atlético in 2022, once the non-aggression pact between both clubs has been broken.
Meanwhile, on the horizon of the next course the figure of Trent Alexander-Arnoldwhose contract expires with Liverpool this summer. The Red captain has in mind leaving his lifelong club, and it is an option that Madrid is seriously considering, as long as he arrives for free in the summer. The operation would only be taken into account for the winter market if the price was in line with a player whose contract ends in six months. Liverpool won’t make it easy there, but there will come a time when they will have to decide if it is better to get some money for Arnold, no matter how little, than for him to go for free in the summer.
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