Llast season, the Real Madrid He suffered a curse in the form of injuries that ended up definitively penalizing his options to fight for the League and Champions. The team remained in the penultimate rung in the bidding for both competitions, after suffering a sequence of physical mishaps the likes of which had never been seen before. Valdebebas, nor possibly in the old Sports City of La Castellana.
No player of the white club suffered that curse in terms comparable to Dani carvajal. The right-back formed in the Madrid quarry could only play a total of 15 matches between all competitions. Carva suffered a total of five injuries in academic year 20-21, of which four were muscular. Mishaps, all of them, of importance, which were from the four games of loss to the 12 of his penultimate injury, in which he registered a total of 64 days of absence from the playing fields.
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In this sense, the full recovery of ‘2’ is one of the priorities of the new Madrid technical team, led by Carlo Ancelotti and with Antonio Pintus as in charge of physical preparation in a club’s bid to end the recurring physical problems that plagued its squad throughout the past season. Carvajal’s case is considered paradigmatic, since he is a soccer player in fullness (29 years old), with a discreet medical history up to the previous year.
Carvajal follows a custom physical plan with the aim of recovering the best version of a footballer who stands out for his physical power, intensity and offensive strength. For this reason, Madrid did not participate yesterday in the friendly match against him Lightning, as he did not do in the one eight days ago before the Fuenlabrada, and the idea is that he does not play in the duel next July 25 against the Rangers in the Ibrox Stadium from Glasgow. The plan is that he can have minutes with real fire in the fourth game of the Madrid summer (August against the AC Milan in Austria, if another previous match for the Whites is not closed), but without running the slightest risk, because the priority is to get the player back for the start of the official competition. There is no rush and there is the maximum interest in returning the player to his best physical condition after a season that weighed on both sports and mental levels, in the face of the recurrence of the mishaps that prevented the player from being one of the group’s dynamics for most of the season.
Carvajal’s plan, in addition to following most of the activities that mark the group’s dynamics, is complemented by work sessions in the pool, specific gym routines and attention to a personalized meal plan. The intention is to create the framework that allows the ‘2’ to recover his best version, that of that aggressive, intense and powerful footballer who made a fixed place in the Real Madrid starting eleven since his return from the league. Bundesliga in the 13-14 season, always surpassing the competition of all the teammates who performed in the same position as him.
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That dynamic was blown up in the 20-21 season. Carvajal, a footballer who used to move on the border of the 40 games played per year, saw his numbers plummet to 15, 13 in the League and two in the Champions League, to add only 1,119 minutes of play.
Lucas, the replacement
Carvajal’s physical problems forced Zidane to pull resources. The first option should have been Odriozola, but whenever he could, ZZ pulled Lucas vzquez, one of the multipurpose of the template. In fact, the Galician finished the course as the eighth player on the squad with the most minutes played (about 3,000), until an injury in the Classic I sent him to the nurse. In any case, Lucas proved to be a reliable alternative to Carvajal, to the point of achieving, thanks to his performance as a right-handed winger, a renewal that seemed complicated in the first months of 2021. Now, he hopes to compete for a position with the longed-for best. Carvajal’s version.