Sid Lowe

But you're absolutely right that away at Villarreal is a proper test.

And if they were to come through this, then I think there would be a kind of a feeling of optimism that would come back.

Now, we shouldn't

overlook something here which is that Xabi Alonso won five out of five before they went to the Super Cup and so this isn't a team that was necessarily struggling to get results it was a team where the dynamics didn't feel good a team where they weren't getting the results against the biggest sides and they weren't playing particularly well now obviously what Monaco does is not just register as a victory but register as a game in which they performed and in which in particular Vinicius who was a big part of course of the problem with Xabi Alonso performed so well.

Yeah, I mean, look, I think there's a couple of things here.

And I think that first point is an important one, that they are slightly different crowds.

Not entirely, but slightly.

And you do get a sense of people coming for the Champions League games as an occasion, rather than turning up for a routine league match.

I also think that one of the ways to judge this is to look at the first few minutes of the game against Monaco, or indeed look at the warm-up in the game against Monaco.

When the teams came out to first come out onto the pitch and look around an hour or so before the game, there was a kind of a sense of, well...

We had our protest at the weekend.

And I think there was indifference more than anything else.

Then, of course, as the game went on, there were moments in which Real Madrid started to play well.

And that increased the enthusiasm and took away some of the whistles.

And for me, there was a couple of really key moments towards the end of the first half.

One of them was when a pass fell behind Jude Bellingham and he fell on the floor.

And there was kind of applause, kind of a supporting thing that said, all right, come on, we can do this from the crowd.

And then a moment after that, Vinicius Jr.

did what...

I'm afraid to say, was a rather pointless attempt at a pirouette, which went wrong.