Marca<\/a>“<\/p>\nJos\u00e9 Mourinho had earmarked Trent as one of his key defenders after a turbulent first season at the Bernabeu.<\/p>\n
His limited minutes across the first three friendlies told a different story. Fierce competition with Dumfries has left him on shaky ground. With so many players away at the World Cup, Mourinho had to rebuild the team, and right-back quickly became one of his thorniest problems with two big names fighting for the shirt.<\/p>\n
The experiments back it up. Against Fiorentina, Arnold started at full-back and Dumfries came on ahead of him on the wing. The Englishman saw out the match while the Dutchman was hauled off in the 75th minute.<\/p>\n
Against Ferencv\u00e1ros, Mourinho flipped it: Dumfries started and Trent came on in the second half.<\/p>\n
Deportivo La Coru\u00f1a brought the same plan in the third match, with the Dutchman starting this time on the wing and Trent returning after the break at full-back. On this occasion it was the former Inter man who played the full 90 minutes.<\/p>\n
Dumfries’ quality gives him a slight edge heading into the season, and he fits the mould of the player Mourinho loves to turn into a fighter, even if he didn’t show his best during pre-season.<\/p>\n
Trent, meanwhile, looked sharp, comfortable and desperate to prove himself at Real Madrid after a first season that gave him no end of trouble.<\/p>\n
The same battle is playing out in attack, at centre-forward, where minutes across the last two matches were split almost evenly between Endrick and Carlos Esp\u00ed.<\/p>\n
Mourinho has sown doubt on purpose, chopping and changing names and line-ups without settling on anyone, forcing the lot of them to compete right up to the final moment of pre-season.<\/p>\n
Right-back and back-up striker remain up in the air. That uncertainty is the Portuguese’s best weapon to squeeze the most out of a team still very much a work in progress.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The early stages of Real Madrid’s pre-season handed the coaching staff a chance to run the rule over…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":70041,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[23952,24960,26306,26911,1414,82,83,18298],"class_list":["post-70040","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-madrid","tag-club-friendlies","tag-d-dumfries","tag-deportivo-de-a-coruna","tag-deportivo-de-a-coruna-vs-real-madrid","tag-j-mourinho","tag-madrid","tag-real-madrid","tag-t-alexander-arnold"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/spain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/70040","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/spain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/spain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/spain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/spain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=70040"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/spain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/70040\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/spain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/70041"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/spain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=70040"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/spain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=70040"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/spain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=70040"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}