Jude Bellingham has many qualities to praise and seems to unearth a new one each game, but his enduring availability should not be overlooked.
By the tender age of 20, Bellingham had racked up more than 14,000 minutes of senior football. For comparison, Wayne Rooney – the last English player to conjure such feverish excitement during his teenage years – only accrued 10,989 at the same point in his career.
Carlo Ancelotti didn’t make his senior debut until he had already turned 20 but during four and a half decades as an elite player and manager, the Italian has certainly come across some promising young talents. Yet, even Ancelotti has been dumbstruck by the Birmingham-born midfielder. “I’ve never seen a player of that age make such an impact,” he gushed earlier this season.
However, Real Madrid will have to take to the field against Las Palmas on Saturday afternoon without their prolific prodigy.
Real Madrid fell behind at home to rock-bottom Almeria last weekend after just 39 seconds and didn’t eventually take the lead until the 99th minute. Bellingham began the fightback with a second-half penalty and teed up Dani Carvajal’s winner with a cushioned header from the top of an invisible staircase into the sky.
Real Madrid benefitted from three hotly disputed VAR calls but Almeria’s deflated goalscorer Edgar Gonzalez wasn’t entirely correct when he claimed: “Every decision went their way.”
In the aftermath of Carvajal’s late winner, Bellingham was booked alongside the topless goalscorer after getting involved in a needless scuffle with Almeria’s Luis Suarez (not that one).
It was a suspension-inducing fifth caution in La Liga for Bellingham. Unlike the Premier League, where players have their slate wiped clean after their club’s 19th league match, there is no mid-season reprieve in Spain’s top flight.
Bellingham’s influence on Madrid this season has been shockingly emphatic but the Spanish giants haven’t struggled in his absence so far.
As Las Palmas midfielder Maximo Perrone pointed out before Madrid’s trip to the Canary Islands: “They have so many players that the absence of Bellingham, a great player, will be covered by another great player.”
After opening his Real Madrid career with five goals in his first four appearances, Ancelotti didn’t dare leave out his new talisman until…
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