the penalty spot it is a lottery, a double-edged sword for the one who assumes the role of caster: hero or villain. Zico with Brazil, Baggio with Italy, Maradona with Argentina, Platini with France, Messi with Bara and PSG or Cristiano himself against Bayern… The best players in the world who missed a penalty have passed through a summary trial. Benzema he ran into his particular black beast, Serge Herrera, who has stopped the Frenchman two last year plus the latter who hit the crossbar in the tie harvested by Osasuna. Karim looked at the new pitch looking for an explanation to understand why the ball rose so high.
Carlo Ancelotti knows from experience that no one is safe from a losing streak and he has already shown his total confidence in Karim Benzema. “Last year he missed two against Osasuna, but Karim took the most important penalties last year against City and marked them. He is the one who best throws them and he is going to continue throwing them”, commented Ancelotti, aware that a few months ago Karim was a hero after scoring, among others, a Panenka-style penalty against Chelsea, And now it’s time to regain confidence.
Benzema, for his part, is also very calm. Hurt for not having completed the comeback after taking a penalty after excellent control inside the area. He scored another goal disallowed for offside by millimeters and had a great volley shot in the first half that went wide.
It is true that Benzema is not in his best shape, mainly because, as Ancelotti said when the level was rising after the start of the season, the knee injury came that has kept him out of the team for a month. He came back against Osasuna and went from less to more, but luck from eleven meters turned his back on him.
Just a bump from Benzema
The truth is that Karim assumed with the departure of Ramos to be the shooter of the penalties, something that was always denied him in Madrid, first because it was Cristiano and then Camas, to the point that his scoring record, compared to other scorers, suffers. In the Champions League, for example, where he has a nice duel with Lewandowski, with 89 goals to the Frenchman’s 86, for being the third highest scorer in the competition after Cristiano and Messi, Karim has added three penalty goals for the 16 that the Pole has.
Benzema’s trajectory on penalties was almost immaculate since he took over from Ramos. He had scored on all nine of his pitches. His first failure did not come until last season, against Celta, to which we must also add last season the two that Herrera stopped him with Osasuna and the one that hit the crossbar this last day. That’s four misses in the last seven releases.
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For Ancelotti there is no debate with Benzema