Real Madrid boss Zinedine Zidane has congratulated Chelsea on their victory over his Los Blancos in the second leg of the Champions League semi-final tie.
Thomas Tuchel’s side already had the upper hand after a 1-1 first leg draw in Madrid.
The result rarely seemed in doubt at Stamford Bridge, especially as Chelsea wasted numerous scoring opportunities.
They forced several saves and rattled the frame of the goal twice.
Timo Werner nodded in from a yard after the Kai Havertz shot had come off the crossbar, then late on Mason Mount sealed it on a Christian Pulisic pull-back.
N’Golo Kante and Jorginho dominated the midfield against Zinedine Zidane’s often confused 3-5-2 approach.
Zidane expalined some of the key decisions he took along the line before Real Madrid crashed out of the compettiton.
The Real Madrid manager said after the match: “Chelsea deserved to go through. We did our best, but they deserved to win and go through. The players were prepared for the semi-final and I’m proud of them. They did their best, but we were one game away from the final and Chelsea played really well. They’ve gone through and I’d like to congratulate them”.
“We had a lot of players missing, but now we have four games left in the league and we have to recover and be ready to fight for the league title. It’s really important that we do that. We’ve had a really good Champions League run and we were just one game away from the final. We’re not going to throw in the towel with four games to go now. We have to finish the season as strongly as we can.
“That’s football. It was a tough game. We fought and did our best. We had a good start to the game. When they scored, nothing changed, but perhaps it had a psychological impact. Now we’re disappointed. When you lose a semi-final no one is happy. It’s a tough moment, but tomorrow we’ll be back training and we’ll begin preparations for the next match.
“He needs a run of games. Eden has to play, he has to recover his confidence and all that, but by playing games. It’s a gradual process. It’s his second game in a row and we have to get him back playing.
“The formation was very clear. We played with three at the back and two wing-backs. We play lots of games like that. It didn’t come off for us because we lost a lot of duels and we were lacking something, that’s true, but we did our best and that’s football. Having said that, these are demanding games and we started off with some chances, if you get a goal things can change. But it went the other way and it was difficult because they had a lot of opportunities to score. They deserved the win and that’s that.
“We’ve spoken about this a lot this season. It’s been a year with lots of injuries, ups and downs, all sorts of things. That’s the way it is. Even so, we’ve done good things in this Champions League campaign to get this far, we deserved that and we were just one step away from the final, a single game. We have to congratulate the team who were better today. That doesn’t change what we’ve achieved. Now we have to rest up and think about the last four league games.”