When Ancelotti's Madrid reinvented comebacks: "If I don't die today, I'm immortal"

After eliminating Chelsea at the Bernabéu last year, Carlo Ancelotti walks into the Real Madrid dressing room puffing.

As if he had just been emptied and about to vanish.

"Dead.

Dead.

Unbelievable,” he murmurs.

He hangs his coat on a hanger and sits on a bench.

"If I don't die today, I'm immortal," he says to the camera.

That moment of Ancelotti, who has won everything everywhere, squeezed physically and emotionally to the limit, contains all the essence of Madrid's amazing journey in the last Champions League, the one of crazy comebacks.

The scene appears in the three-part docuseries

that premiered on Friday, March 10 on Apple TV +.

Seen from the end, the journey seems predestined to the unusual from the beginning.

In the summer of 2021 Florentino Pérez was looking for a coach after the abandonment of Zinedine Zidane.

At that time, Ancelotti was on the Everton bench.

One day he called the club's CEO, José Ángel Sánchez, to ask him about a discard to take to England.

The closing of that call is an amazing twist, which the coach recounts: “I saw that they were looking for a coach and I said: 'Look, Real Madrid needs one of the best.'

And he asks me: 'Who?'

And I told him: 'Have you forgotten about 2014?'

2014 was Madrid's first absurd prodigy with Ancelotti.

In Lisbon, in the Champions League final against Atlético, when they were losing 1-0, and they had already exceeded the 93rd minute, Sergio Ramos headed in a corner, tied, and Madrid won its tenth European Cup.

Sánchez hung up and five minutes later Ancelotti's phone rang: “The president called me.

We have not talked about the contract, nothing, only if I liked to return, ”he says.

Three days later they presented it in Valdebebas.

decipher the indecipherable

That Italian Champions League in Lisbon opened a series of documentaries made from material recorded inside the expedition by the club:

,

... With Ancelotti's new Champions League, the format It has been expanded to three chapters.

In essence, it is the same material from the other times, enriched with interviews with players, managers, coaches and journalists who try to decipher the indecipherable.

In some moments of the qualifying rounds last year, the same defeatism was seething in the team's locker room as in a large part of the fans.

Casemiro opens up about the effect of losing the first leg of the round of 16 at the Parc des Princes: “When the game ended, I said: 'It's impossible to beat Paris Saint-Germain right now.'

They are much better than us."

However, the confidence of the indomitable Modric survived in the group: “When I left the field, with Carvajal on the bench, I told him: 'In the second leg, we are going to crush them”.

Benzema headed in front of Rudiger and goalkeeper Mendy to score the final 2-3 against Chelsea.PAUL CHILDS (Action Images via Reuters)

However, during the first hour of the lap at the Bernabéu, it seems that the opposite is going to happen.

They march 0-1 with hardly any signs of life.

Until Benzema puts pressure on the goalkeeper, he recovers the ball and equalizes.

The Frenchman doesn't even try to explain it: “The fans are already getting in for the comeback.

And then what happens happens, ”he says with a little smile that suggests a secret that may not even exist.

Alaba also does not understand what happened.

Nor what happened to him: “When Karim scored [3-1], the stadium went crazy.

We went crazy.

Then I saw that security chair, and I picked it up.

I don't know why, I don't know how he got into my head… ”, he recalls.

That chair is the symbol of madness.

Of a mystery that terrified rivals from there.

And Alaba took her home.

"I have that chair," he confesses in the documentary.

The team had entered a mystical stage in which the most absurd became the most reasonable.

Ancelotti says that when Barça beat them 4-0 at the Bernabéu, a blow that under normal conditions would have devastated Madrid, he said something typical of a lunatic in the locker room: “Calm down.

We are going to win the Champions League and the League... But he said it to also give me a little courage, ”he confesses now.

And he laughs.

When the next tie came to the Bernabéu, Madrid buried the advantage they had from Stamford Bridge (1-3) and once again found themselves on the brink of elimination against Chelsea.

Marcelo remembers that then he was the shaman: “Rodygo and I entered.

And I used to talk to Rodrygo: 'You're going to score,' he recalls amused, and still somewhat incredulous.

"But in my head it was: let's see what happens, because it is very difficult."

And Rodrygo scored.

Marcelo remembers that later the boy, astonished, asked him: "Did you really tell me that I was going to score?"

Let's see… I said you were going to score for helping us”.

What could they no longer believe then?

In the first leg of the semifinal in Manchester, against City, Benzema had a penalty to reduce the deficit, which was then 4-2.

He had just missed two maximum penalties against Osasuna.

And he threw it to the panenka.

"Either I do it now or I'll never do it," he recalls.

“It is a goal to show the opponent that we are very confident.

I'm doing it because it's an important game and I know it's going to stay in people's heads”.

Still in the City stadium, Benzema once again appealed to the spell: "At the Bernabéu we are going to do something magical, which is to win."

So it was.

some omissions

Madrid advanced towards its fourteenth European Cup confident that it carried something supernatural.

Anything was a definite sign.

The series includes a video that Courtois recorded of the door of his room in the hotel on the outskirts of Paris: “Curious detail: my room ends at 14 [it was 314].

Go for the 14″.

They succeeded, and the Belgian was the best player in a final that started late due to incidents around the stadium resulting from the disastrous organization of UEFA.

Although this has disappeared in the series.

Not a mention.

In a tale of supernatural wonders, the removal of what might be considered the next-to-last unusual hurdle seems strange.

But above all, it is one of the most intense memories of the thousands of fans who suffered the panic of attacks by vandals, the anguish of being left unprotected by the authorities and the despair of mistreatment by the police.

And yet, it is the story of a prodigy of an institution that turns out to be prodigious with inexplicable frequency.

“I would stay here for the rest of my life,” says Ancelotti.

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