Atletico Madrid Show Capacity to Never Make It Easy for Themselves at Valencia
Atletico Madrid’s determination to do things the hard way seems to know no bounds.
Because of the qualities instilled in them by manager Diego Simeone, the great battlers of Spanish and European football seem to want to work hard for everything they can get.
It is, of course, an admirable quality, but their ever-nervous fans must wish that things were a little easier at least some of the time.
With this latest win at Valencia, their team went to the top of the La Liga table for a few hours at least, but yet again the three points were tougher to achieve than they should have been. As is the Atletico way.
To the outsider looking in, the fact that their second goal only came in stoppage time in a 2-0 win—echoing the one goal successes in the previous game against Bayern Munich and the one before that against Deportivo La Coruna—would only mean one thing.
In their eyes this would have been the same old defensive Atleti, the team controlling the game and just doing the bare minimum in an attacking sense to win it—as is Simeone’s wont.
You can view that approach as negatively as you want—although it has broad positives against the biggest sides such as Bayern—but it wasn’t in evidence here.
This was a 2-0 win that was about as convincing as a 2-0 win gets. It should have been 4-0, and it might have been 6-0.
That it wasn’t was down to a variety of factors, but before we get on to the most obvious one, we should at least pay tribute to the opponents.
This was undoubtedly a better Valencia to the one we’ve seen in La Liga so far, with the presence of their new coach, the ex-Italy manager Cesare Prandelli, in the stands doubtless driving the team on. Los Che have always had talented individuals, but they just seem to have lost their way a little recently.
Driven on by an always passionate Mestalla crowd, they didn’t exactly take the fight to their visitors, but they were determined to stay solid.
Atletico felt their way into the game, and it took them a while to dominate it, but once they did—from about the 25th minute onwards—there was only one deserving winner. That there should even have been a question about that was as much down to Atletico’s DNA as anything else.
Because, unlike Barcelona or Real Madrid—who could well rack up cricket scores this weekend as they take on Eibar and Celta Vigo, respectively, or indeed on any other weekend—there’s a strange sense that taking the emphatic route simply isn’t the Atletico way.
Why take the simple chances when you can sweat and worry and feel a game of football in the manner that they, and more specifically their manager, do?
This, of course, is an odd notion.
Simeone would want his team to take all the chances that come their way all of the time, but there was something so Atleti about the way that they passed up two opportunities to make this a much less stressful early afternoon for their supporters, who often aren’t afforded such afternoons.
First, it was Antoine Griezmann’s turn.
Following Nani’s clumsy shove on Angel Correa came the chance to put what went wrong at home to Bayern in midweek behind him, but in the end, all he could do was exacerbate it.
Griezmann missed from the penalty spot in regular time for the fourth time out of his last six kicks, and there must now be a serious question over whether he should be allowed to continue as his club’s first-choice penalty taker.
The Frenchman is, of course, such a talented individual when the ball isn’t dead, and he seems to have evolved his game in recent seasons so that he sees a lot more of that ball wherever he is on the pitch.
The addition of Kevin Gameiro—who eventually put the game beyond doubt far, far later than it should have been in the second minute of injury time—has allowed Griezmann to go exploring.
He’s so often the link man between the midfield and the attack now, a floating menace who gets the unreserved attention of opposition players when on the ball. Previously, those players would have all been behind him as he sprinted past them.
He’s becoming more Lionel Messi than Cristiano Ronaldo, if you like, but his prowess from the spot doesn’t match the feats of either of them.
His well-struck effort was saved by Valencia’s penalty-saver-extraordinaire Diego Alves in the closing stages of the first half, and with it came the cry for someone, anyone else to take Atletico’s next spot-kick. When one arrived, someone else caused stress levels in the stadium to rise.
The captain Gabi—the man who feels and lives for Atleti like no one else in the squad—decided that he should take a captain’s responsibility, but all he achieved was showing just how hard it is to beat Alves from the spot.
Valencia do have a genuinely excellent goalkeeper, and one who presented the biggest barrier to Atletico during what could have been a hugely frustrating afternoon but ended up only being a nervy one—but the club’s fans have got used to those by now.
Griezmann—helped by the introduction of a lively Fernando Torres—ultimately did make up for his penalty miss by slamming his side in front shortly before the hour mark, with Gameiro sealing the win in the dying stages.
It could have been oh so different had Valencia’s Eliaquim Mangala better directed his late header that could only find the grasp of Jan Oblak, but the concession of any points from this game would have been a crime on Atletico’s part. They deserved all three even if they went about it in their usually strange manner.
But that is just their way, and it is a way that has served them well in five years under Simeone. Their presence at the top of the La Liga table at the time of writing goes to show that it serves them well.
They need to be more ruthless, they need to be putting games out of sight, and they surely need a new penalty taker if they want to make things a little easier on themselves. But this team live on a knife-edge—the way that they do things makes them feel alive.
It isn’t likely to change any time soon, and nor should we want it to.
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