Why Atletico Madrid Need Antoine Griezmann to Impress Against Malaga
Defeats happen.
They are part of football, and no matter how good you think your team are, a defeat will lurk around the corner eventually.
Sometimes defeats spring out at you in an unexpected manner, they creep and they crawl and they nip up on you when you least expect them. Then they bite, and then they hurt.
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They hurt a lot more than the defeat you can see coming a long way off just by the sheer nature of them. Then they can often gnaw away at you for weeks and months to come. You might say something like: “Yeah, we might have won all of these games, but if only we’d not lost that one we can’t stop thinking about.”
That’s what defeats do to you. They make you doubt.
And even though Atletico Madrid would have known that defeat was possible at a very good Sevilla last weekend, this is how the club’s players should be feeling now.
Sevilla are a fantastic side managed by an exciting, progressive coach in Jorge Sampaoli, and they have excellent players in the rejuvenated Samir Nasri and Luciano Vietto, but that still shouldn’t change the Atletico players’ mindset.
Manager Diego Simeone should be front and centre of every team meeting right now, reminding them that the only teams this club can lose to in an acceptable manner should be Real Madrid and Barcelona.
That’s it. Those two.
Because allowing the teams from below Atletico into a La Liga title or top-four race represents something of an oversight from Simeone’s side. They should be the team to worry and annoy the big two and it should, from their point of view, stay that way.
And for all of the collective brilliance of Simeone’s men, the key to all of that lies in one individual.
Antoine Griezmann came into this season off the back of his stunning displays for France at Euro 2016.
The Frenchman was awarded the Golden Boot for the tournament’s top scorer and the Golden Ball for its best player, and both were thoroughly deserved.
His clever movement and constant showing for the ball helped France reach the final in Paris, where they were to lose to Portugal despite Griezmann’s best efforts.
For Griezmann, the tournament was a huge disappointment on a collective scale given the highs he had missed out on due to France falling short, but you can’t argue that it was a roaring success for him on the personal side.
Suddenly a player who was seen as merely just very good was catapulted into the realms of the world superstars.
Griezmann was the star of a continent-wide tournament and once you’ve done that, then you deserve to be mentioned among the modern-day greats.
As the nominations for the 2016 Ballon d’Or have been announced, that is exactly where Griezmann finds himself, and it would be no surprise to see him named in the top three when the final results are announced early next year.
But given Atletico Madrid are trying to overhaul Barcelona and Real Madrid on both a domestic and continental level, and also given manager Simeone has opted for a more dynamic, attacking approach this season, then the question has to be asked over whether Griezmann is doing enough to affect Atletico Madrid’s results right now.
As Simeone has slowly but surely brought in a system which allows for the midfield players in his team to get further and further forward, it means Griezmann—the best player in his team—has been dropping further and further back.
The Frenchman has been in a creative mode from there, as the likes of Kevin Gameiro, Fernando Torres, Angel Correa and of course the hugely in-form Yannick Ferreira Carrasco have operated with attacking abandon in front of him.
In fact, the Belgian international Carrasco has almost overtaken Griezmann’s status as Atletico’s golden boy in recent weeks, with his hat-trick against Granada and Champions League winners against both Bayern Munich and Rostov suddenly making him the main man.
But Griezmann is used to being the main man, and if anything the fact that he isn’t will only make him more determined to retake that mantle.
Surely Atletico would be better served getting their best and most dynamic goal-getter further and further up the pitch? And you can almost see that Griezmann wants that.
He has scored six goals already this season, which is a decent-enough total, but you can bet he’s thinking more about his dreadful penalty record because he’s missed against both Bayern Munich and Valencia this season.
Even though Atletico still won both games, you can bet Griezmann is still thinking about the failures, and the personal disappointment they produced at a time then he is becoming more and more widely accepted among the decision-makers and pundits of the modern game.
And so in the week that he has been voted La Liga’s best player in the previous season, the Frenchman must be a little puzzled.
He is seeing Atletico Madrid perform surely as well as they have ever done during his time at the club, but they aren’t quite as dependent on him as they were before.
After the aforementioned defeat at Sevilla, Atletico have tumbled to fifth in the Liga table ahead of the weekend’s meeting with Malaga. It is clearly a false position because they will surely finish in the top four and probably the top three come the final reckoning, but it should hopefully make a few minds wander back to what made them so exciting in the first place.
It would be great to see Griezmann operate as the leading light in Atletico’s side on Saturday evening, perhaps playing as close to whichever central forward Simeone picks as possible.
Because if he gets up to speed and up to his brilliant best, then both Barcelona and Real Madrid are bound to have a problem.
A Griezmann spurt of goals in all of the next five or six games—which include a trip to his old club Real Sociedad—would remind Atleti’s rivals of the sharp-shooter Simeone possesses in his ranks.
Griezmann was voted the best player in the previous La Liga season, and he could easily do it again.
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