Holiday season - for some

Thursday saw the last training session of the season for the Real Madrid squad members not already with their national teams. A total of seven first team players (Raúl, Michel Salgado, Saviola, Balboa, Soldado, Codina, and Miguel Torres) said their goodbyes (Guti, with special permission from the club, did so the previous day) and will reconvene on July 14th to spend a week in the Portuguese Algarve.

The following week, the squad will fly to the Austrian town of Irdning for preseason training before moving onto London on August 1st to take part in the Emirates Cup trophy. There they willface the hosts, Arsenal, as well as German side Hamburg. They will then move onto Colombia to play against Independiente de Santa Fé on the 7th, nipping back to Frankfurt to play Eintracht on the 12th.

The rest of the preseason is yet to be defined, although Real Madrid will have to take on Valencia for the Spanish Supercup before the start of the new season. The final friendly of the preseason will be the Santiago Bernabéu trophy scheduled for August 27th against Sporting Portugal.

Some members of the squad will get less holiday time as they are involved in games with their national sides over the summer: Casillas, Sergio Ramos, Pepe, Cannavaro, Metzelder, Robben, Sneijder and Van Nistelrooy are involved in the Euro 2008 championship; other players with international commitments are:

• Marcelo, Baptista and Robinho are in the Brazil squad involved in friendlies and World Cup qualifiers over the first three weeks of June
  
• Heinze and Gago will similarly be with the Argentina squad
  
• Higuaín and Drenthe will take part in Olympic qualifying with Argentina and the Netherlands, respectively
  
• Diarra will captain the Mali side in World Cup qualifying games