The clock was approaching 9 p.m. at the Santiago Bernabéu, with a still poor attendance, and the Real Madrid players came out to warm up on the pitch. At that moment, it seemed like the rival team was doing so. The few fans showed from the beginning that they wanted to express their dissatisfaction with whistles over a blank season and all the mess that has happened this course in the locker room: the Tchouaméni-Valverde fight, Mbappé’s shirking and messages, or the situation experienced with the dismissal of Xabi Alonso due to the attitude of the hard core, led by Vinícius and the Uruguayan player himself, captain and still in the infirmary.

“I would have loved to play the classic,” said Kylian Mbappé. The French star came out to the mixed zone to face the music and stand up for himself: “I know there are many people who don’t speak and I have to look at the press to know what they say. I prefer to speak here and face it.”

There are matches that last a sneeze; others, on the other hand, are as long as a night watching over a baby. The Madrid-Oviedo (2-0) with nothing at stake falls squarely into the second category. What is the point of the game of a team whose motto is only to win when it can no longer do so? That is what the white footballers who took to the pitch would have thought, whistled at by their fans during the warm-up, then victims of a sepulchral silence in a half-empty Bernabéu. It is more interesting to spend the San Isidro holiday elsewhere than watching Camavinga lose balls in his season to forget, the icing on the cake being that, hours before the match, it was made official that he would miss the World Cup. “I understand that he is pissed off,” said the eloquent Didier Deschamps.