After advancing to the quarter-finals of the Champions League with a 2-1 aggregate win over RB Leipzig, Real Madrid coach Carlo Ancelotti acknowledged that his team did not play well in the second leg, which ended in a 1-1 draw. He described the performance as “poor” and said they “need to improve” for the next round.
Madrid took the lead in the 65th minute when Vinícius Júnior converted Jude Bellingham’s pass at the Santiago Bernabeu. Leipzig did not give up and levelled the score three minutes later through Willi Orbán’s header. The match was on a knife-edge as Leipzig’s Dani Olmo nearly snatched a winner in stoppage time, but his strike rattled the crossbar.
“It was a bad game, with low intensity,” Ancelotti told Movistar. “The psychological aspect conditioned our game. We played against an opponent with quality, who played with nothing to lose, and we had the brakes on from the start until the end. We suffered, but the important thing was to get to the quarterfinals, and we’re there.”
Madrid failed to register a shot on target in the first half, with Ancelotti making a half-time change, bringing on forward Rodrygo for midfielder Eduardo Camavinga.
“The idea was to press more, with energetic midfielders, but we played with the brakes on,” Ancelotti said. “No pressing, slow with the ball, not direct, with sideways passes.
“It wasn’t a good night obviously. It’s my fault. Sometimes in the Champions League this can happen. It happened to us against Chelsea at home [in April 2022]. But sometimes a bad game can see you eliminated.”
Madrid have qualified for the Champions League quarterfinals, joining Bayern Munich, Paris Saint-Germain and Manchester City, and are leading LaLiga, despite their lackluster performance.
“We have a seven-point lead in the league and we’re in the quarterfinals. If we’d been offered that at the start of the season, we’d have taken it,” Ancelotti said in his postmatch news conference.
“I might have been wrong with the starting 11. We must be self-critical and improve. … The criticism today is totally deserved. The whistles [from the crowd] at half-time were deserved.”
“We suffered a lot. They played well and we played bad, simple,” Madrid defender Antonio Rüdiger said. “We were just sloppy, slow, zero intensity. In the Champions League you can get punished for this … We didn’t find the right answer today.
“You have to be switched on for 90 minutes plus. It wasn’t a good performance, but at the end of the day we are through.”