There has been no blood spared in Spain. The reaction to Real Madrid's humiliating exit from the UEFA Champions League competition, having lost to a young Ajax team 5-3 on aggregate in the last-16, has been brutal.
Marca, the country's biggest-selling sports newspaper, ran with a picture this morning on its front cover of a half-empty Santiago Bernabeu Stadium on the 90-minute mark. Those fans remaining in their seats sitting glumly under the 1-4 scoreboard while the paper's headline declared: "Here lies a team which made history". The wrong kind of history—three defeats in a week at the Bernabeu, including two losses to eternal rivals, Barcelona, which has ended Real Madrid's participation in the Copa del Rey and opened up an unbridgeable 12-point gap in the league title race with only 12 games left to play.