Atletico Madrid Handed a Humbling Lesson That Hints at Even Tougher Times Ahead
The opposition were obviously better, their players more revered and more expensive to both purchase and then keep at the club thanks to their huge wages, but there can be no doubt about this.
Atletico Madrid’s 3-0 defeat at home to Real Madrid on Saturday was by far and away their worst loss of the season, and given their increasing status in world football over the past few years, it was perhaps the worst for several campaigns.
It basic terms, it was a third defeat in their last four matches in La Liga, with the nine points dropped in those games the exact figure that they trail leaders Real by in a table that has become increasingly difficult to look at over the past few weeks.
Toward the end of October, Atleti were travelling back from Russia, having just beaten FC Rostov 1-0 in the Champions League. It was an eighth win in nine matches in all competitions, with their only dropped points coming in a 1-1 draw at Barcelona—a result never to be sniffed at.
Everything was rosy in the Atletico garden. Manager Diego Simeone looked as though he’d settled on a preferred, more expansive way of playing and several performers—most notably the burgeoning talent that is Yannick Carrasco—were coming to the fore.
Now, things are rather different.
Because while the defeats at Sevilla and Real Sociedad were regrettable, they generated nowhere near the level of navel-gazing and introspection that will follow after the Madrid derby defeat at the Vicente Calderon on Saturday evening.
There are, of course, several reasons for that.
This was—pending the completion of La Peineta, the new stadium that Atletico Madrid have committed to playing in from the beginning of next season—the last Primera Division derby at the Vicente Calderon.
Atleti would've been desperate to put on a show and bloody the noses of their aristocratic rivals at their storied home ground just one more time. It didn’t happen.
But there was no hard-luck story. This wasn’t an evening of stressing and straining every sinew or of the blood-and-thunder, Cholistic football that Simeone has instilled in his team over what is nearly five years in the job. It was never allowed to reach that point.
Sure, there was a degree of fortune about Cristiano Ronaldo’s first goal—the deflection on his free-kick taking the ball fizzing past goalkeeper Jan Oblak, who had made an unfathomably good save from a Ronaldo header when the score was 0-0. But Atletico don’t deserve to believe they were hard done by.
Ronaldo’s 39th career hat-trick—completed via a penalty he won and a close-range finish from Gareth Bale’s fine run and cross, both in the final 20 minutes of the match—was a reminder that Atletico, for everything they have given to world football in the past few years, have simply never been able to win the star wars.
The best, most expensive and therefore most famous players will always end up at one of two clubs in La Liga, and they aren’t one of them.
But Atletico’s achievements under Simeone hinted that didn’t matter and that you could succeed with hard work, good players and a ferociously determined attitude.
Pretty much every big name in football—both in terms of players and their clubs—have had days to forget at the Calderon. Real Madrid included. Atletico would swarm all over teams and choke them through a mixture of fear, organisation and no little footballing ability. But the fear is that those days, much like the stadium, will soon belong in the past.
The previous two losses at Sevilla and La Real were just that: losses. They were unfortunate, but they happened.
This one hinted at a lot more.
In seeing Ronaldo laud it over the Calderon, home fans would have been forgiven for thinking that everything the club had stood for and achieved in recent years was now moot.
This is supposed to be a ground where the big names struggle, but here Ronaldo was imperious in scoring his hat-trick. His display was a perfect response to what had been a growing army of critics and a reminder that, for all of his marketability, his somewhat galling sense of self-worth and celebrity persona—the exact things that Atleti have almost been the opposite of—he is still an absolutely remarkable footballer.
He’s scored better hat-tricks, but this was his stage for the evening. His performance was incredible, even if the audience wouldn’t have appreciated it.
And in that performance—and that of the darting, daring Bale—he almost embarrassed Simeone.
The Argentinian’s teams are not supposed to allow the big boys to enjoy themselves on this turf, but Ronaldo and Bale, their team-mates and their manager, Zinedine Zidane—perhaps the biggest name of all—would have loved this.
For Atletico, there is only reflection. It was a first home league defeat since losing to Barcelona in September 2015—and a first to anyone other than Barca for two years.
This is their lowest point of the season, but as ever, there will need to be a response and a way back toward doing what Atletico teams do.
PSV Eindhoven’s visit in the Champions League on Wednesday brings a first chance for that, and what would perhaps previously have been seen as a fairly unimportant game given Atletico have already qualified for the knockout stages suddenly takes on a new meaning.
The Dutch side obviously, and thankfully, don’t have a Ronaldo or a Bale in their ranks, but they perhaps need to be treated as though they do.
The fans should turn up the volume and remind the players to tap back into the qualities that have made their club so revered and feared in world football.
They were nowhere near that standard against Real Madrid, with the occasion and the opposition only adding to the sense of deep disappointment any team feels after losing a derby match.
There’s a worry that the loss is emblematic of something deeper, though, with Simeone under immense pressure to make sure it isn’t.
This looks to be a huge test of both his managerial ability and his hunger to succeed again.
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