Real Madrid-Mallorca

Mallorca continues its meaningless run through the big four of La Liga with a trip to Madrid for what is always a great game. Any player, especially one that does not play for a big club, has to enjoy playing at the Bernebeu against Real Madrid. Even if the game is meaningless, its still a game teams such as Mallorca look forward to playing.

Real Madrid has to feel a sense of urgency watching Barcelona dominate the league and win everything. What they have to do to catch up is for another discussion by someone besides me, but their mind is not on this game this weekend.

Mallorca, the little team that always wants to prove something, may be a little more focused, but the relaxed nature of the game is still obvious. While Jurado wants to show his stuff for the youth team he grew up with, most players just want to impress as they would in any other match. As we saw last weekend against Barca, when a big team is not motivated to play and rests a lot of key players, games like this can be won. If its a meaningless game who cares though.

This will be just like the game with Barca. Basically a kickabout and not much else. I expect Mallorca to field its best team, but Madrid will not. This should make the game interesting and while still intense, not as intense as the relegation games that will also be played this weekend by other clubs. Manzano wants to finish with 54 points and maybe a top eight finish. Whether we finish 8th or 15th, we have shown again that we are in the bunch of clubs that are too good to be relegated, but not real threats for Europe. This seems to be a consistent pattern for Mallorca. What needs to be done to take that next step is a question that gets asked every year at this time. While its nice to have eliminated the relegation issue sooner then expected, the question as to how to take that next step up remains. Mallorca is a club that can leave the mid table group and move up, but stability and consistency are traits we must improve before that can be an honest reality. There is much work to do in the offseason.

As the silly season begins and we wonder if we will keep Arango, Moya, Jurado and others while also wondering who comes in to replace those who leave, this weekend will be a good time for fans to enjoy some good soccer without any pressure. It might lead to a surprise result and maybe a lot of goals.

Prediction

Real Madrid 3-2 Mallorca

Category: Mallorca Team News

Tags: Mallorca Team News

Subscribe   The Offside RSS Feeds

Print

Share