Atletico Madrid Will Have Served Warning to Their Rivals with Granada Hammering
Title races—and indeed fights to avoid relegation—can often boil down to two fairly different but equally important factors.
They are moments and statements.
It is the moments that are the most thrilling, and they often remind us of why we all fell in love with football in the first place.
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They are the wins achieved when backs are against the wall, the last-minute winners, the penalty saves or the crunching but fair last-minute challenge that ensures the points. They are raw, and although they exist very much within that moment, it is clear to everyone who witnesses them that they mean much more.
When everything is said and done and the dust settles on the season, it is these moments that dictate the final order of things. If you want to break it down to the moments that mean the most, then Al Pacino, who could probably play Diego Simeone well, gives a pretty dramatic explanation of them in Any Given Sunday (note: video contains language NSFW), but we’re straying from the point a little here.
Because it was a statement that Atletico Madrid made against Granada on Saturday evening, and what a statement it was.
On a day when Barcelona and Real Madrid scored 10 goals between them, the fact Atletico managed seven has served as a huge warning to their title rivals.
This is suddenly a team that will not only fight and scrap to earn the moments needed for wins and points, but they are one that is capable of the kind of ruthless demolition of La Liga’s also-rans that Barca and Real have been dishing out for years.
And what’s more, they did it after going a goal down.
Isaac Cuenca’s fine strike was only the third goal Simeone’s side have conceded all season. When it went in, there would have been audible intakes of breath around the Vicente Calderon.
It isn’t normally like this, and as notorious worriers, the Atleti fans would have chewed fingernails, looked around them and wondered just what sort of evening this was going to be. Granada were leading 1-0 up until the 34th minute.
Then the statement happened.
Others would have got wind of Atletico’s struggles. Barca, having just won comfortably against Deportivo La Coruna, and even Sevilla, who had earned a victory on the road earlier in the day, would have smiled. Real Madrid, who were preparing to win 6-1 at Real Betis, would have heard the news too.
At this point, if Atletico were going to come back and win the game, then it would have been via either a moment or a statement.
Had they struggled and dragged themselves back into it, perhaps with a late equaliser and then an even-later winner, then that moment would have been remembered and held up as evidence that the title challenge was alive.
Instead, they went and scored seven times.
It was the first time they had done so in any game for almost three years and only the second this century. As statements go, it was emphatic.
And what was perhaps most striking about it wasn’t who scored the goals but who didn’t.
For any team to score seven goals and have none of their conventional forwards get on the scoresheet must be some sort of record. Kevin Gameiro left the field after just over an hour, and Antoine Griezmann followed shortly afterward to be replaced by Fernando Torres.
None of them found the net, with the first three goals all coming from the direct talent that is Yannick Carrasco, whose hat-trick took just 26 minutes either side of half-time.
The Belgian is probably the player who is benefitting most from Simeone’s altered game plan and increased emphasis on attack this season.
So soon after he netted the winner against Bayern Munich in the Champions League, here he was rampaging around the Vicente Calderon, almost shooting on sight and taking the fight to an opponent that admittedly didn’t offer much fight back.
Carrasco has admittedly needed to be indulged for a large part of his Atleti career, which isn’t much more than a year old.
He didn’t feel like a Simeone signing when he arrived from AS Monaco last summer, but given his young age—he only turned 23 in September—then perhaps the manager always saw him as a star in a side that was going to be more expressive in time.
They certainly are that now.
And here he was, almost being encouraged to act as the main attacking threat because Granada retreated so deep after their goal, thereby nullifying the threats of Gameiro and the more advanced Griezmann.
There would have been a time when that would have been enough to get something from this Atletico side—indeed, that time might have been earlier this season—but the Carrasco-led response from the hosts was incredible.
And in seeing what he was doing from the bench, Nicolas Gaitan then decided to follow suit when he replaced Gameiro.
He scored almost instantly, reacting to a loose ball in the box, and then he kickstarted what was a fairly riotous last 10 minutes when he scored the first of three goals after the 80th minute.
Like Carrasco, the Argentinian is another player who should be benefitting from this different-looking Atleti side, but Simeone is easing him in gently following his arrival from Benfica in the summer.
It could be that the performances of Carrasco will be harming Gaitan’s long-term aim of holding down a position in the team, but he seems to have slotted in nicely, and it’ll be interesting to see how much of a game he gets against FC Rostov in the Champions League on Wednesday after his two-goal cameo here.
There was still time for Angel Correa and, rather sweetly, Tiago to add the sixth and seventh Atletico goals of the evening, but by then, Barca and Real fans would have turned the game off, disappointed that the result they’d thought was possible at one stage had emphatically gone away.
And that’s the great thing about statements: They quite often have a bigger effect on rivals than on the team that produced them.
Whereas the season’s moments can leave those on the wrong end of them feeling as though they’ve just experienced a swift kick in the chest, or a kind of robbery, the statements make rivals worry.
They worry that the team they are up against is a lot better than they thought it was and that such teams have a kind of invincibility and momentum that will be impossible to stop.
That’s certainly what Barca and Real have specialised in over the past few seasons, but it says an awful lot about Atletico that they are the story after a Saturday when the supposed big two won 4-0 and 6-1 respectively.
They are statement results, but they kind of get overshadowed by the one achieved by Atletico.
Simeone’s men have every intention of being the major players in this title race, and their rivals know it.
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