Real Madrid beat Villarreal 1-0 at home. Forget the scoreline for a second, because it's doing a lot of lying about how this game actually went.
Vinicius Junior had a goal ruled out, then got himself sent off with a straight red for pulling the hair of a Villarreal player. Real Madrid spent a chunk of the match down to ten men, and Villarreal, a team that should have smelled blood the second that red card went up, did nothing with the extra body. They barely looked like scoring.
Real Madrid's discipline fell apart in a home game they should have controlled from the opening whistle. A senior forward losing his head enough to grab an opponent's hair is a lapse that could have cost his team the game outright. It didn't cost them only because the team across from them couldn't take advantage.
Results matter in October, and a team that grinds out a win while missing a man for a stretch can be showing character. That's fine when the opponent makes you pay for it. Against a Villarreal side that couldn't make ten men count for anything, it's an opponent letting you off the hook. If Madrid needed a disallowed goal and a numerical disadvantage to still only win by one, that's a team that got away with something.
Villarreal's part in this is just as damning. A team that can't find a way through ten Real Madrid defenders for the rest of a match has a finishing problem, a creativity problem, or both. Their fans have every right to be furious watching their side fail to punish the single biggest gift a visiting match can hand you: a one-man advantage against one of the best teams in the country. That's a side without a cutting edge, full stop.
None of this puts Real Madrid in crisis. One scrappy home win doesn't erase a squad's quality. But a performance this sloppy, built on a reckless red card and papered over by an opponent too blunt to make them pay, should worry a club with a Clásico coming up. You don't get bailed out by Barcelona's attack the way you got bailed out by Villarreal's tonight.
Madrid should be glad they won, but how they won it should bother them.
