Ivana Andrés: The Real Madrid defender announces herself on the European stage

Is the centre-back fundamental to Real Madrid's season and future?

The sound of the full-time whistle was greeted with exuberant celebration by the Real Madrid bench, knowing that they had just qualified for the inaugural group stages of the UEFA Women’s Champions League after beating Manchester City in the final qualifying round. The Las Blancas were deserved winners and performed diligently through some astute defending. One of the standout performers in that tie – and indeed across the last two seasons – was Ivana Andrés. 

Their group stage draw was rather kind to them, having been drawn an arguably slightly easy group consisting of Paris Saint-Germain, Kharkiv, and Breidablik. While PSG have some outstanding players, they aren’t the force they were last year after some key players departed the club over the summer. Real Madrid will fancy themselves but it will still need more focused defending against Marie-Antionette Katoto and Kadidiatou Diani.

Part of writing about Ivana is to provide a better and wider understanding of a player that is relatively unknown, but it’s also to highlight a player that is potentially on the same level as the likes of Irene Paredes, Mapi León, and Magdalena Eriksson. Ivana has the qualities to rival some of the aforementioned players and thrive in the UEFA Women’s Champions League.

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Ivana’s move from Levante to Real Madrid was a game changer for the side who now housed a central figure and dominant centre-back. Coming in, she’s been able to lead and transform this Real Madrid defence, giving them a leadership quality that was missing in previous teams. Not the quickest central defender, Ivana’s positional awareness is instead the core strength of her game that forms the foundation of her overall playstyle. Anticipation, interceptions, tackling, passing, and movement are fundamental results of her ability to identify and understand her positioning and deal with situations as they arise.

Much of what we’ve seen from Ivana is based on the type of opposition Real Madrid have come up against. Their style of play is compact and disciplined, yet agile enough to cause teams trouble on the counter-attack. They opt for a structured 4-4-2 system that is predicated on compactness and disciplined defending, keeping their shape to stop any movement through and between the lines. Defending starts from the front and both strikers are extremely hard-working and will look to actively press and win the ball back high up the pitch. The pressing style is very much an aggressive man-marking press based on zonal triggers. What this means is if a player enters a certain area, the Real Madrid player in that vicinity will step up and press the player.

Further back, the defence remains narrow and compact, complementing the rest of the team. The full-backs are probably where Real Madrid are weakest and much of the opposition’s opportunities will come through the wide areas. This inherently means the central defenders need to anticipate and intercept crosses and pullbacks. It is here where Ivana starts to prove her worth by showing heightened awareness of her positioning and any potentially dangerous chances. The whole system revolves around this press and positioning that allows them to counter-attack at will. This leads us to Ivana’s role in the side as the defensive core in both defending and starting attacks.

Ivana’s role is to first and foremost keep Madrid pushed up and ensure possession is won out of their 18-yard box. The central defender is aggressive and steps up to defend if the opportunity presents itself by pressing the opposing striker. She looks to sense and anticipate any passes that could be intercepted early without putting her team in jeopardy of leaving space in behind. Ivana has become a pseudo-defensive midfielder in her actions because of how aggressive she can be which is depicted in her heat map.

If the opposition do manage to penetrate the second line, then she is triggered to step up and stop the supply from penetrating further into Real Madrid’s box. This step forward is not only a method to stop the attacker, but also gives time for her partner to cover behind her and the central midfielder to come round in support to take up her position again.

Take this passage of play against Manchester City. City manage to penetrate the midfield and find a pass through to Khadija Shaw who manages a smart turn to go past the central defender. With a clean path through to Real Madrid’s box, Ivana looks to close the distance and space between herself and Shaw, limiting the angle. In doing so, she’s able to usher the striker away from goal and force Shaw to have to cross instead of shooting. This allows the other defenders to cover the centre of the box though Ivana manages to intercept the cross.

She might have started slightly deeper but Ivana’s awareness meant she made up for her lack of pace. The defender ranked second for interceptions with 143 in Primera División Femenina last season which points towards Real Madrid’s constant defending and possible high line, but also Ivana’s importance to the side with her covering.

But it’s not just down to her intelligence in quick-fire situations – it’s also her ability to calmly cover spaces and reset play for her team. If teams try to play long balls for strikers to run in behind, Ivana can read the situation and quickly move across to retrieve possession and pass it to the nearest player. Her composure in these situations means there is a reliable ball carrier at the back that is also attributed to her ball skills going forward (more on that soon).

Any central defensive partnership consists of a mixture of both aggressive, forward-thinking defenders and more cover-oriented players. In most cases, you’ll find these profiles of players in both players which means that there is a major interchange between the two. In Ivana’s case, she’s displayed both sets of abilities which is a point I touched on earlier. Ivana’s aggressiveness and tackling ability has been a major highlight of her overall game, and one that has proved effective as it’s allowed Real Madrid to win possession higher up the pitch and create better transitions.

Last season, Ivana averaged 6.29 defensive duels with a 74.5% success rate. While this doesn’t rank in the top 30 in the Spanish first division, it does boast an impressive figure, namely the success rate. It shows her importance to both Real Madrid and her qualities as a European central defender.

This passage of play shows exactly how Ivana’s diligent defending turned defence into attack in one swift move. Her tackle was quite aggressive which caused the ball to deflect off the player and put Real Madrid near the halfway line which is met with another line-breaking pass. 

Here, she manages to dispossess Shaw very high up the pitch which doesn’t result in a turnover but instead permits Real Madrid to reset and assume their compact formation while City have to build out an attack again. It was this frustration that wore City down over 90 minutes.

Ivana isn’t an uber-technical player nor a creative lynchpin, however, her footballing intelligence and awareness enhance her decision-making, especially when it comes to on-the-ball ones. Ultimately, it’s about creating goal-scoring chances and progression through a range of passing, whether it be a simple two-yard pass or a 35-yard diagonal pass from the back.

Against lesser teams, Real Madrid have much more of an opportunity to assert themselves and while we don’t know what their exact playstyle will be considering the number of changes made by David Aznar in the last 12 months, Ivana has shown a good technical understanding and vision to find good progressive opportunities from the back.

This pass from a game against Real Betis demonstrates Real Madrid in a dominating position. So much so that the ball is being circulated across midfield with the central defenders taking up positions near the halfway point. Once Ivana receives the ball she immediately looks for a forward passing option and finds an attacker in acres of space. The pass – though simple – results in a goal, but it was the speed at which the transition occurred which was most notable.

Here, Ivana receives a short pass from her goalkeeper and is faced with a high press. Instead of a short pass, she finds a longer one through the middle which reaches a central midfielder. In turn, that progressive pass transforms into an opportunity that enables Real Madrid to construct an attack with the opposition committing players forward.

In terms of ranking, Ivana ranked 29th in progressive passes per 90 minutes with 10.08 which in itself is a high volume figure, but it also shows Spain’s intention to teach a forward passing style of play. In pure progressive passing numbers, Ivana made a total of 278 progressive passes which were good enough to place her fourth in the league, with only teammates Kenti Robles and Marta Corredera as well as Barcelona’s León ahead of her. She also has the second-highest number of long passes. All of these statistics only point towards Ivana being an excellent player in possession and one that has the qualities to lead this team from the front.

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Often underrated, Ivana should be considered as one of the best central defenders in Europe, let alone Spain. Each of her qualities has hints of León, Paredes, and Eriksson, which can only bode well for the Spaniard and her future. While Real Madrid aren’t of the quality of Barcelona yet, they have a central defensive figure who can replicate the effect Leon has had on the Catalans and become a defensive stalwart.

There is a school of thought which thinks Ivana is underrated and to some extent, that is true. The wider audience isn’t aware of her qualities yet, but her performances across the Manchester City games will have made onlookers take notice. Real Madrid will be tough to break down and they will surely put in heroic defensive performances against the bigger teams. Paris Saint-Germain will be another massive test for the Las Blancas and one that Ivana will relish, coming up against a couple of world-class centre-forwards. The Las Blancas are entering a new era and need a figurehead to lead them forward in Ivana.

Photo By Oscar J. Barroso/Europa Press via Getty Images