crinkly_ears | Mesut Pops His Collar, Visits Facebook & Arrives Back In Training

Mesut Pops His Collar, Visits Facebook & Arrives Back In Training -
The Villarreal Match Spam With Some Press Observations!

Bonus!Wounded Sami Khedira.

Facebook Back & Forth

We know exactly what Mesut was up to in the hours before the match - he and Sami decided to save time and post exactly the same blurry picture on Facebook. It shows the boys in the Madrid catacomb leading out to the pitch.

Off at Madrid's Facebook page (and can I just note at this point that

andriy_7's eye for detail is quite astounding!) the same picture also showed up, along with this one -

But who is taking these pictures? Perhaps Madrid's photographers are occasionally responsible for the fairly predictable stuff that shows up on Mesut (and Sami's) Facebook and they are happy to allow the boys to upload the photographs they take? That is one theory, certainly. But why is the quality so awful?

Then yesterday (the day after the match), Mesut updated again with the following message:

Mein Mitgefühl für die verstorbenen Erdbebenopfer. Allen Überlebenden wünsche ich Kraft und Hoffnung.

I feel sympathy for all earthquake victims in Turkey. Much hope and power to all the survivors.

Türkiye deki depremde hayatini kaybeden Insanlara Allah tan rahmet diler tüm Türk halkina gecmis olsun dileklerimi iletirim.
Mesut

Also - sometime before the match began, Mesut and Sami boarded a couple of buses and were, as usual, quite inseparable!

It's always one and then the other! Without fail!

The Match Spam - And A Few Press Observations

A perfectly splendid match in every way - except that it didn't have much Mesut in it as he only came on in the final 20 minutes with Madrid 3 goals up.

You could comb those eye-lashes! Note how one half of the collar refused to stay up!

He also popped his collar - which is quite nearly a perfect 10.o on the Mesut-metre of ado.orableness! Latent rebellion? Trying to be like the cooler kids in the locker room? Whatever! It's too ado.orable for words!

High Fives for Kaka!

One note of interest - Mesut came on for the inexhaustible Angel di Maria and not Kaka - who had spent much of the second half to that point getting kicked accidentally on purpose by his marker and might have benefitted from the assault on his Achilles Heel. What this suggests of course is that the continued experiment of sticking Mesut on the wing will continue whenever Kaka is on the pitch, and Mourinho wanted to give Mesut another 20 not-particularly-stressful (at 3 goals up) minutes getting used to being there.

Of course, Mesut does have the occasional brilliant game on the wing. Arguably his best game in the league last year (against Sevilla, in Madrid's 6-2 destruction of them away) came on the right (though he did drift to the centre throughout that game). He even has some rather splendid moves up his sleeves - like long over-head passes of some 40 yards in length -

Like, wow!

And in theory, of course, he should find it easier to shoot from the right - though he doesn't of course. A quick look at Mesut's goals over the past 3 years indicates he nearly always scores from the left-hand side, some 80% of his goals are made with the left foot, and he prefers shooting at the near-post (as do many Bundesliga products - who are trained to score by shooting low and toward the posts).

When playing in the centre, he is more likely to drift left. So what we have at the moment is a Mesut Ozil who is playing almost doubly out of position. He isn't a winger. If he were a winger, he'd prefer the left-side. We've stuck him on the right side though.

And in the interests of full disclosure we also have Marca announcing to its readership that Kaka is now untouchable and Mesut is "the only player whose level has gone down since last season". Do please keep in mind though that two months ago, Mesut was the Crack of Madrid, Kaka was completely useless and ought to have been sold and they were completely incompatible. One month ago, Kaka was definitely "back" and Marca wanted the now brilliant Angel di Maria benched and a Kaka/Ozil midfield was flavour of the week. As early as 3 weeks ago, the paper wanted Sami Khedira benched (though they were full of praise for him yesterday!) and a 4-1-4-1 formation.

So for those of you who have been expressing concern about Mesut and the newspaper kerfuffle surrounding him at the moment, please keep in mind that if he has two brilliant games in a row, the papers will do a 180 degree turn and go back to terming him Madrid's best investment in 50 years.

Such amusing fickleness!

Mesut Returns To Practice!

With game-day on Saturday, the boys were back into training the next day.

All the usual suspects were there!

It's a German invasion!

Lovely collection of Turkish Delight!

Trip to San Sebastien

The boys play Real Sociedad tomorrow (Saturday) at 20:00 local time. Good luck Mesut, good luck boys!

There's a bromantic triangle off to the right-hand-side of your picture!

Many thanks and much, much, much love & affection for the relentlessly dedicated

andriy_7.

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