The Daily Merengue is a place where you can feel free to discuss all things football. Do not be alarmed by the overt RMCF bias. It’s in the name!

Shoutout to the mods who do a fantastic job, Valyrian Steel, Felipejack, Juninho, NeRObutBlanco and yours truly, Kung_Fu_Zizou

Vinicius On Cloud 9

The Ballon d’Or snub has done nothing to dent the confidence of the talented Brazilian. He keeps showing why he’s the best in the business.

It will soon become a joke to everyone that he was snubbed for anything football related.

Making a habit of scoring hatricks early on in his career. Vinicius trajectory will gone down as one of the most storied in history.

I don’t think we’ve ever witnessed a player develop his game in real-time as we’ve done with Vinicius.

Militao in the doldrums

Militao went from fighting to reach his level after a career threatening injury to now being in an even worse situation with a meniscus and ACL at a time when the 3rd CB Tchouaméni is also not available to cover for him.

The club has had insanely bad luck with injuries since the start of the decade.

Zidane’s stint ended with a season of record breaking injuries and we’ve been seeing injury after injury since then.

At some point the club won’t be able to buy enough cover for the injuries.

Consider now that both Jacobo and Joan have been injured after being earmarked as CB cover.

Even if the club had signed Leny Yoro and promoted and academy player, we’d still be short at CB right now.

Barcelona Drop Points

Real Madrid needed Barcelona to drop points. The fixture list is very favourable for Los Blancos at the moment and will allow the boys to make up some ground on the the old enemy.

Food For Thought

Carlo Ancelotti has been himself and the team has recovered and returned to winning ways.

Suddenly we have to use academy players. The players who are supposedly either not ready by Don Carlo standards or not good enough by the standards of those who insists it must be the only reason they don’t get first team opportunities.

How will you know how good a player is if he’s not given a chance? How could anyone have known Jude is a fantastic scorer if he’d never been deployed as one?

Or that Camavinga can cover at LB and Tchouaméni at CB?

These all come from giving chances to players. Many talented players fall by the way side but just as well many will be looked over for not being given a chance in the first team at their club which developed them.

We shouldn’t be forced to use academy players. It should always be policy to have 2 given a chance every season. There’s always enough room in the squad and it’s cheap and has long term benefits financially and otherwise.

My Unpopular Verdict

The club should continue to find solutions in the academy until next summer.

This way the youngsters who are good enough will continue and the club doesn’t have to deal with a greedy market or a long term contract for a temporary player.

Let Fortea move up and get some minutes and learn to play at the highest level. Bring up another CB from the academy. Bring the Castilla DM up as well.

Make La Fabrica Great Again