Chelsea star Reece James endured a challenging evening at Santiago Bernabeu on Wednesday night where he had to mark Real Madrid starlet Vinicius Jr. In the weekend defeat to Wolves, James was deployed at right-back but for the Champions League quarter-final Frank Lampard opted for a back five in an attempt to deal with the attacking threat of Carlo Ancelotti's men.
"Partly the reason," Lampard said after the game when asked if the threat of Vinicius Jr was his reason for playing a back five. "I think I had different things to consider. Vinicius one-against-one is a big problem for any team so we wanted to created two-against-ones on that side of the pitch. It didn't help getting the yellow card for Fofana so early, it makes you nervous. He's a player that is very good."
As the Blues interim boss mentioned, an early booking for Fofana presented Chelsea with a difficult challenge on the left-hand side. Vinicius was a constant thorn in the side of James and Fofana and while the duo mostly dealt with his threat there was a particular moment in the second half where that was far from the case.
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The Brazilian winger has the ability to almost completely stop his momentum before then advancing onwards at a frightening pace. Mid-way through the second half James and Fofana were both culpable of falling into his trap with the latter bypassed far too easily after Vinicius had escaped from James with relative ease.
James has had some epic battles in previous years with some of the best wingers in the world. In recent months he has come out on top in individual duals with Wilfred Zaha, Marco Reus, Rafael Leao and in last season's Champions League clash between Madrid and Chelsea, he ensured Vinicius had a minimal impact on proceedings.
However, on Wednesday evening that was not the case and the Englishman has now been told exactly what he must do next by Rio Ferdinand. "Reece James against Vinicius Jr. today - Reece James would have never had a harder game than today in this game. He gave him a really hard game today and Vinicius Jr. didn’t show him any respect - it was ‘I’ll get the ball, now I’m going to take you on’,” Ferdinand told BT Sport.
“As a defender there’s pride and you know there are millions of people watching - let alone in this stadium, right? You go home and you analyse your performance, you get in there with the analysts' team and you say, ‘give me my clips, I want to see exactly what happened. I want to see what I did wrong today, my approach, did I soften my knees on my approach? Was I going in too upright or too quick and not putting the brakes on?’
“You want to go through it with a fine tooth comb and say, ‘right, it’s me vs you next week - gaffer, make sure I am one-on-one with him and I am going to go and prove to the world that I can deal with people on this stage at this level’, because that’s what it is about."
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