Casemiro missed 17 games and 83 days between October and January at a time we were also missing Martinez, Shaw, Dalot, Martial, Eriksen, Malacia, Diallo. Had Sancho and Antony drama, Hojlund, AWB, Varane, Lindelof all also had varying amounts of time off through injury in the same period or beyond.
We were fielding the back up of the back up, you cannot compare this to Real Madrid at all, not only is our depth incredibly poor due to historically poor squad building, we were playing depth of depth in key positions through the spine of the team. Those that did play unscathed were therefore overplayed leading to poor performances of our best players.