Ancelotti looks for the icing

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Carlo Ancelotti, last Sunday at Pizjuán.MARCELO DEL POZO (REUTERS)

With a 10-point lead with 10 matchdays to go, Carlo Ancelotti was asked if the League was already doomed.

“How are you going to lose a Champions League final when you win 3-0 [at half-time]?

It's happened to me once [with Milan against Liverpool in 2007] and I hope it doesn't happen again,” he replied with a smile.

This Tuesday, six games from the end and 15 points ahead of a Barcelona stuck again (they have a pending match), the 62-year-old Italian coach insisted on diplomacy: “I have too much experience to feel like a champion.

We are close, but it is not over yet”, he stated before visiting Osasuna (9:30 pm, Movistar LaLiga).

His non-verbal language, yes, did not escape evidence: Real Madrid is seven points away from lifting the title.

So close that even a sequence of their own and others' results could give them the championship even this Sunday if they win in Pamplona, ​​and Atlético and Barça do not do so in their respective duels.

As a traditionalist Carletto also recently warned, very given to sayings, the cake has been made, "only the icing is missing".

Also his, because he would become the first coach to lift the five major European leagues (he already did it with Milan in Italy, Chelsea in England, PSG in France and Bayern in Germany).

To try to accelerate what everyone already takes for granted, in El Sadar he will suffer the loss of Casemiro, whom he hopes will recover within a week against City from his problems in his left thigh, and gives Modric rest, two absences that open the way to a less common core.

Mendy, Marcelo and Hazard are still in the infirmary, where Jovic and Mariano fell again, the two

who could never help Benzema, whose presence in Pamplona is guaranteed.

"If the player is fine, he doesn't make any sense not to put him in," the coach replied when they raised the possibility of a break with a view to the Champions League at a press conference.

More than 30 years after the Osasuna-Madrid team earned a reputation for being volcanic - softened in recent times - the visit to Pamplona always appears on the whites' calendar with the asterisk of uncomfortable.

Without anxiety this time in either of the two teams, the Navarrese, ninth with 44 points, have opened the illusion of Europe after three straight wins at home and the victory last Saturday at Mestalla.

According to his trainer, Jagoba Arrasate, his men are "liberated" and "without stones in the backpack."

“We have earned the right to live a special night and get a good result knowing what we have in front of us.

We cannot leave with a complex, but with respect.

We have to try, we play at home and we are willing to try it being brave, ”claimed the Biscayan, who also left a notice.

"If we go thinking about painting their faces, the opposite will happen."

In the first round (0-0), his good quartering was the first warning for Madrid of the difficulty that awaited them against very closed defenses.

The only obstacle, in fact, that was found during a quarter that served to mark distances with the rest of the platoon and begin to pave a League that only a disaster would leave him without.

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