Toni Kroos has revealed the consequence after Cristiano Ronaldo left Real Madrid and his wish to finish at Madrid in the interview with The Athletic.
“A lot of us didn’t play our best football last season,” he readily admits.
“After three Champions League wins in a row, you could perhaps expect to lose a bit of sharpness and it took us time to adjust to the loss of the 40 or 50 goals Cristiano Ronaldo guaranteed each year. But at Real Madrid, that’s unacceptable. When we were knocked out by Ajax [in the last 16], many suggested that was the end of this team. We were written off as over the hill but that only provided extra motivation for us to prove them all wrong.
“It reminds me of the way people look at [Roger] Federer. When he was 34, everybody was sure that was it for him, and then again at 36, but he just keeps on playing as if he’s 28. You don’t lose your quality. And we’re not that old yet.”
For the first time since his move to the Bernabeu from Bayern Munich in 2014, Kroos had personally felt the ire of the crowd as things took a turn for the worse 12 months ago.
“Madrid have very demanding and emotional supporters,” he says. “They’re either on cloud nine or feel lower than low. I’m not like that. I’m always kind of in the middle emotionally. I stay away from newspapers and reading things online but of course, you can’t help but feel the club becoming unsettled when the results are wrong.
“The president [Florentino Perez] has always been very relaxed in his dealings with us. It wouldn’t make much sense to get carried away. The key is to work hard and stay calm. It’s easier said than done when the house is on fire but I’m blessed with the gift of not getting nervous — ever. I was certain that we could all still play football and get back to our usual levels.”
Kroos adds that the Madrid helped by demonstrating their continued trust in him as last May, they renewed his contract until 2023.
“I had thought of them as this rather ruthless Galacticos club before I came here but that impression was completely wrong,” he says.
“The people at the club, the president and his staff, are all very warm-hearted. There are a lot of hugs when you meet them, I wasn’t used to that in Germany. Maybe it’s do with the Spanish mentality but I’ve only ever had very pleasant dealings with everyone here.”
In order to avoid the kind of minor physical complaints that hampered him throughout 2018-2019, he spent pre-season doing extra fitness work. But, Kroos says, the biggest reason for his and the team’s recovery — “my personal performance chart and that of the team tend to run in parallel lines” — has been the cool head of Zidane, now in his second spell on the bench.
“Zidane told us: ‘Stay calm and trust in your abilities. Every big Madrid player has been booed in this stadium before but the truly big ones win the crowd back’.
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“His great advantage is that he’s experienced it all before as a player here. You believe in what he says. He has a hand for leading the group and there’s this great aura of calmness around him. It rubs off on us. Not in the sense that he doesn’t push us hard in training but he constantly conveys the huge confidence he has in us. If you work hard and do things properly, success will follow automatically because of your quality. He’s been right so far.”
Talking to Kroos, you come to understand that Zidane’s somewhat enigmatic public profile hides a superb manager.
“He owns the dressing room thanks to his natural authority,” Kroos says. “There’s nothing forced, no act. That’s extremely important. Especially at a team like Real Madrid, you need to get the players behind you. Everyone needs to feel valued and part of it. That’s not easy because some will play more than others but he does it extremely well.”
“When I arrived in 2014, we were essentially a counter-attacking side, dropping deep to create space for Gareth [Bale], Cristiano [Ronaldo] and Karim [Benzema] to make deep runs,” Kroos says. “But under Zidane, our philosophy has changed,” Kroos agrees. “He wants us to have the ball, and he wants us to win it back quickly. We attack the opposition high up and there is more structure to our game. I prefer it that way. I’d like to have the ball and make opponents run for it rather than run after the ball for 80 per cent of the game and playing two or three decisive passes. That wouldn’t satisfy me. I’ve really benefited [from Zidane’s tactics]. We all have. He deserves a lot of credit for changing the style and for integrating players that fit well into it.”
Crucially, the Frenchman has also instilled a new-found love to the kind of defensive toiling that might previously have been deemed somewhat beneath this team. “It’s one of our greatest strengths right now. We don’t concede a lot of goals. It wasn’t always like that. In pre-season, we were 5-1 down against Atletico at half-time and lost 7-3.
“We were at the point where we said: ‘It’s going to be tough like this’. You can’t rely on scoring three of four goals every game but you can try and have defensive stability. The change wasn’t so much tactical but one of mentality. Everyone works hard for the clean sheets. When you realise you get rewarded for your collective work and see results, it starts becoming fun.”
A Real Madrid team enjoying hard work off the ball sound like a pretty daunting prospect for Guardiola in what could be his last shot at winning the Champions League with Manchester City.
Is there a chance Kross could work with Guardiola together again?
“I want to finish my career at Madrid, so I’d say it’s very unlikely,”he laughed.
Kroos hasn’t seen much of the soon-to-be-deposed Premier League champions this season — “I know their manager and I know they have good players. I don’t need to watch a lot their games to know it’ll be very difficult against them” — but rates his side’s chances 50-50.
“I’m looking forward to the tie. It will be extremely interesting — possession against possession,” he says. “They will put everything in it now that the league is gone for them but so will we. Both teams can play on the break but the main aim will be to have the ball. As I see it, the key is to defend well when you can’t win it back immediately and use the bits of space that always open up in transition better than they will. A few individual moments like that will decide the tie.”