‘Tranquil’ Zinedine Zidane takes win as stuttering Real Madrid prepare for Spurs

“Should you be worried?,” Zinedine Zidane was asked. “No, I don’t think so,” he said. It was late Sunday night at the Santiago Bernabéu and Real Madrid’s third home game of the season had just ended, like the other two, without a win. In the final minute, a goal from Toni Sanabria had given Real Betis a 1-0 victory. Levante and Valencia, the previous visitors, had drawn. Five weeks in, Madrid had already dropped seven points, Barcelona slipping away early.

“Maybe last year we won some games we didn’t deserve: now it’s the other way around,” Zidane said, simply. “That’s football: you have to accept it. It’s still very early, even if it is seven points.”

In La Liga, where title winners have needed at least 90 points for each of the last seven years, dropping seven is significant and at Madrid defeat is never acceptable, even when it can be explained – and Zidane is, not unreasonably, focused on fortune. Publicly, at least. “Sometimes the ball doesn’t want to go in,” he said. “We had 26, 27 chances.” There was support from the Betis manager, Quique Setién, who admitted: “To win here, you know you’ll suffer and that your goalkeeper has to be spectacular: winning here without suffering is a utopia.”

For Madrid, winning was a start: when they beat Espanyol 2-0 before the international break, Isco said: “It was about time we won at the Bernabéu.” Zidane was entitled to think that it shouldn’t have taken so long. Karim Benzema admitted he could have played all night and not scored against Valencia. When Levante came, it was Gareth Bale who had opportunities. Against Betis, the chances fell to Cristiano Ronaldo. None scored.

Madrid had taken more shots than anyone else in La Liga, and by some way. In those three games alone, almost 80. These were matches they really should have won. Zidane talking about efficiency in front of goal. “Three goals at home isn’t many for us,” he said. Nor even could it be seen as a long-term problem. Thirty-five different teams from eight different countries had tried to stop them scoring and failed before Betis did it, 73 games later.

If there was comfort in those statistics, Zidane himself knew that chance alone did not explain a damaging start. Ronaldo had been absent for five games, suspended; Luka Modric, Gareth Bale, Marcelo, and Benzema had all missed matches through injury. James Rodríguez and Álvaro Morata, top assist provider and second top scorer respectively last season, had departed.

When Morata went to Chelsea in the summer, Zidane said he needed another striker. At that stage, he expected it to be Kylian Mbappé, but he joined Paris Saint-Germain instead. “I would have liked Morata to stay,” Zidane admitted.

Yet the squad remained incredibly strong – Dani Ceballos, Theo Hernández and Marcos Llorente added young talent to it – and nor did absences alone explain the results. Yes, Madrid had been unfortunate to drop seven points; yes, the bench might have rescued them as it did often last year; yes, opportunities had been wasted, but Betis’s Setien rightly insisted his team could have caught Madrid sooner. And Zidane admitted after Levante: “I can’t be happy with how we played.”

This Saturday he said he had been happy with how they performed at Getafe, but they had not impressed in clinching a late 2-1 victory, with Ronaldo’s first league goal of the season.

In the last few weeks, when they have been winning, Madrid have not moved the ball as swiftly, nor pressed so high as at the close of last season or the beginning of this, when Gerard Piqué admitted that for the first time in nine years he felt inferior. Defensively, they have looked vulnerable. Up front, there is talent but the ideas are not yet fully formed.

“We’re struggling to generate football,” Isco admitted. Since that Betis game, they convinced in Dortmund – and there is something about Madrid that is as if it takes a worthy stage for them to perform – but less so in defeating Alavés, Espanyol and Getafe. After a first half dominated by Madrid, Espanyol hit the post and then pushed them back as the second began; twice Pedraza hit their post at Alavés; against Getafe, there was a late chance for Mauro Arambarri at 1-1 and their winner never felt inevitable.

“I’m very angry,” Getafe’s manager José Bordalás said. “We know they’re very good running into space so we worked on closing those. Madrid had trouble generating chances. I thought the only way they’d hurt us was inside and we made a change to prevent that ... but that’s where the goal came.” When it did, Zidane leapt from the bench celebrating.

Afterwards, he said he would watch Atlético v Barcelona, which ended in a 1-1 draw, “as a football fan”. He would also have watched as a manager hoping to close the gap. Hoping, but not worrying. The private analysis is different, but the public persona remains. “I won’t ever change,” he has said. “There’s a word I like: ‘tranquillity’.” It defines him and has served him well.

“I enjoy every day,” said a smiling Zidane on Friday as he prepared for Getafe and Tuesday’s Champions League visit from Tottenham, which will be his 101st game. So far, they have won 75 of them; defeat against Betis was only his eighth. He has won seven titles – one every 92 days.