The Great Wall

Solid, reliable, tough, resilient, balanced, organised, serious, hard-working, and disciplined. These are just a few of the qualities that can be attributed to Rafa Benítez's Real Madrid.

This is the general impression created so far of Real Madrid from the pre-season tour of Australia and China. This is the first chance the new coach has had to really get to know his players in the squad and they all sense that things will be very different from now.

The happy-go lucky days of the past are over, and there's no place for jokes and pranks in training under the new regime. Now it's time to knuckle under and work, work, work. The Real Madrid squad wised up to the new deal in the very first training session when Benítez, whistle in hand, stopped the game time and time again when things didn't turn out as he expected.

This is a new singer with a new song sheet. Things have shifted radically from Carlo Ancelotti's passive style of management to Benítez's strict doctrine. Here is a coach who doesn't tire of firing out orders.

It's clear that this is a work in progress but there are already real signs that Rafa's men are taking his ideas on board. So far Real Madrid have only conceded one goal in the four friendlies contested, and that came from a dodgy penalty. To put it another way, neither Keylor Navas nor Kiko Casilla have had to pluck the ball out of their own net as a result of open play.

In China, Real Madrid have re-made themselves in the likeness of the Great Wall, becoming an impenetrable fortress. Although in the last game against Milan they gave away more chances.

The average strike rate against Benítez's Real Madrid this pre-season is about 3.5 shots on goal per game. That doesn't seem like a lot, but the figure takes on new meaning if you compare it with Carlo Ancelotti's stats.

When Carletto was in charge of 'Los Blancos' last season, the team only conceded an average of 3.47 shots on goal per match, a total of 135 in 38 games. An almost identical figure to that achieved under Benítez. The only conclusion to be drawn is that if the team is being threatened to the same degree as it was under Ancelotti but is conceding fewer goals, the difference must lie in the performance of the goalkeepers and number of saves being made between the posts.