By Lee Roden

Real Madrid produced one of their best performances in months on Saturday when they hammered Celta Vigo 7-1, but for Zinedine Zidane it may ultimately matter little.

The league win arrived several games too late for the coach, who took charge of Los Blancos when they were a maximum of five points behind Barcelona, but has led them to a present day 12-point gap from the Blaugrana.

Celta win or otherwise, even the most optimistic of Madrid supporters will concede that their part in the league title race is over, and their European campaign is now of far more importance. It resumes against AS Roma on Tuesday.

With the league and the cup gone, Los Blancos now only have one trophy to fight for, and it’s the least predictable of the bunch. The unescapable reality is that claiming European success is Zidane’s final chance to save his club’s season.

Appropriate, considering it is a competition with which he is inextricably linked, following that thunderous left-footed winner at Hampden Park some 12 years ago.

The Frenchman has only lost one game in his current job, but it was a big one, and that defeat is what has made the greatest contribution to his purportedly precarious position. It took less than a day after Atletico Madrid’s 1-0 win at the Bernabeu on February 27 for leaks to be fed out to the Spanish press claiming that Madrid would only keep their current coach in his job as long as the European Cup is in play.

Well-informed journalists in the capital reported that members of the club’s board believe Zidane lacks the experience to manage in a league as advanced as Spain’s, and that the hunt is on for a coach that better ticks the necessary boxes, Joachim Löw one of the prominent names on the list.

Zidane is only 11 games into his tenure, a small sample size to work with, but the general trend has been one of success at home against sides his team would be expected to beat, and difficulties when playing away or against tougher opposition.

Anyone with any knowledge of his career as a manager and a decent capacity for logical thinking won’t find that tendency to be a huge surprise.

His only previous experience as a head coach is ultimately one of mixed fortunes in the third division, and pushing him in to an already tricky situation at the Bernabeu was a big ask. Unfortunately, logic and Real Madrid president Florentino Perez rarely go hand in hand.

Roma’s visit to Spain on Tuesday is much more than just a last 16 game therefore. It is also a chance, after a 2-0 win in the away leg, for Zidane to finish the job and start to change the conversation from one of disappointment over the league to optimism about Europe.

Progress, and the draw in the quarter-final stage is almost certain to be tough, but it is also true that from that point onwards, five games are all that separates a team from European club football’s biggest prize. In theory, top honours could even be taken without winning any of those remaining matches.

In his preview to the clash with the Italians the French coach insisted his team are not “obliged” to win the Champions League.

Yet it was ultimately Zidane who made the first conscious effort to shift emphasis towards the European Cup, noting that Madrid “still have the Champions League (to play for)” after the Atletico defeat. He knows first hand just how important the competition is for his club, and also how important it could be for his future.

Only two years ago Zidane was an assistant to Carlo Ancelotti when, after finishing third in the league, the Italian came within an inch of being sacked by Perez.

A week later, a Sergio Ramos goal in added time changed all of that. Had the defender’s header missed the target and his team lost 1-0 to Atletico Madrid in the 2014 Champions League final, then Ancelotti would almost certainly have been given his marching orders.

Instead, it went in, Atleti collapsed, and Madrid won their first European Cup in 12 years. Perez, ever the opportunist, hailed his coach for putting together “the most united squad I remember”.

Zidane knows how the Madrid president works better than most, and will understand that he now has a similarly fine margin of error as his old boss had back in the spring of 2014. Win the Champions League, and he becomes virtually impossible to sack.

Fail to do so, and he may find that even his legendary status is not immune to a dictatorial figure who blames everyone but himself for his club’s failings.

Lee Roden is a freelance Spanish and European football journalist. You can follow him on Twitter @LeeRoden89