It’s a good thing for Bernd Schuster that Real Madrid absolutely demolished Valencia Wednesday, because prior to the match, the Real coach gave reporters a thorough tongue-lashing after it was suggested his team had been under-performing. Schuster told them he’d “love a job like yours where you get paid for insulting people, despite not having a clue what you’re talking about.” Moreover, he proclaimed that far from getting lucky late in games, Real was like the soccer equivalent of tennis champion Roger Federer, “toying” with its opposition before putting away games: “tie-break, tie-break, 7-6, 7-6, then suddenly, bam! 6-1,” he exclaimed.
Indeed, the press would have had its knives out for Schuster following that haughty tirade if Real didn’t come away from Valencia with a win. But forget about a first-set tiebreaker, this game was over after a half-hour, as the Merengues scored four unanswered goals between the first minute and the 30th. As Guardian columnist Sid Lowe points out, the emphatic 5-1 win was only “fractionally short of a tennis score.” So, instead of digging into Schuster for his haughtiness, headlines in Spain read: “Real Federer enamors everyone.”
It was a fantastic team performance, involving every one of Real’s attacking players, including goal-scoring defender Sergio Ramos, whose unstoppable right-footed blast was probably the best of the lot. Meanwhile, coachless Valencia was “shocking, absolutely awful, truly, deeply dreadful,” said Lowe.