Why the Sky Is the Limit for Atletico Madrid's Yannick Carrasco

La Liga is the division of ridiculous goalscoring form. We all know that.

At various points of any season, there will be moments when Lionel Messi, Cristiano Ronaldo, Luis Suarez or another supremely talented player goes on the type of run which is frankly ridiculous. Social media will blow up, and numbers will be reacted to in astonishment by all who see them.

At Atletico Madrid, if anyone was going to challenge those types of figures, it has always most likely been Antoine Griezmann.

But the Frenchman—who scored a stunning six goals to win the Golden Boot at the UEFA European Championship in the summer, with France falling just short in the final—isn’t the goalscoring force currently lighting up Diego Simeone’s side.

CURTO DE LA TORRE/Getty Images

Because that is Yannick Carrasco.

The Belgian’s two goals in Saturday’s 4-2 win over Malaga made it seven strikes in his last six games for the club, with the increased level of attacking focus at Atleti this season ensuring that he has been able to get in more and more threatening positions with more and more players around him.

Put simply, Simeone has let the leash off his side this season, and there will now more often than not be two players breaking forward from midfield in support of the two front-line forwards as opposed to one or sometimes none.

Griezmann playing slightly deeper has allowed this to happen, and if anything, Carrasco is popping up in the scoring positions that the Frenchman has vacated.

After a transitional season when he joined the club from Monaco last summer, Carrasco’s displays have quite rightly caught the attention this season, and the club’s weren’t slow to tie him down to a new long-term contract recently.

Simeone was full of praise for the 23-year-old on Saturday, saying via Goal.com:

"

He has grown with hard work and sacrifice on his part, beginning to reach his potential.

He's making goals from both sides [of the attack], works hard like most of the players, gets a lot of balls and he is still growing. 

He has a lot to give and he will use his best virtue, which is his ambition. And hopefully he keeps it [his ambition]. His work, thinking about the team is the most important thing that he is giving us. 

The high point is not that he is getting goals, but how he is one more of those [hard-working] types of players who have worked for us for so many years.

"

In case you hadn’t noticed, the words “work,” “works” or “worked” were mentioned in each one of those four paragraphs, and it appears the nature of that work has been the key difference with Simeone, Carrasco and Atletico as a whole this season.

Aitor Alcalde/Getty Images

Previously, in Simeone’s mind, “work” would have meant getting men behind the ball, controlling the game from deep and not giving the opposition the slightest hint of an opportunity to overrun them.

For Carrasco, this would have limited his game, meaning that he was far too often too far from the opposition goal to do anything about finding it. He scored just five goals last season, albeit with one coming in the UEFA Champions League Final.

And for Atletico as a whole, this meant that the way they were playing was very reactive—not proactive. They would win games by shutting them down and not opening them up.

All that has changed now.

For Simeone, “work” has become the hard yards put in to win back the ball from the opposition high up the pitch and the increased number of players doing all that they can to get into the penalty area to force chances.

CURTO DE LA TORRE/Getty Images

For Carrasco, this means an increased opportunity to get on the scoresheet, and it has been an opportunity that he has grasped with both hands.

And for Atletico, it bodes well in terms of challenging for the major honours that they want to win this season as they take on both Barcelona and Real Madrid.

Of course, those two have squads that are packed full of remarkable talents, but Atletico do too now that so many of them are coming to the fore.

Carrasco has been quietly excellent since the tail end of last season, but Simeone’s natural caution and the performances of others often meant that he wasn’t guaranteed to start every game.

Indeed, at the beginning of this season he wasn’t in the starting XI, as Simeone infamously opted to play four “central” midfielders across the middle of the pitch in the draws with Alaves and Leganes which meant that Atleti’s campaign began with something of a false start.

CURTO DE LA TORRE/Getty Images

Perhaps, in the long run, those results will come to represent a huge blessing in disguise for the club, because they certainly have for Carrasco.

In the weeks which have followed, the Belgium international has become one of the first names on the teamsheet as the increased attacking focus has led to more and more chances for a player with his skill set.

For some, that might have been a difficult mantle to handle as he sought to make the difference, but he has swam instead of sank.

The quality of his two goals against Malaga at the weekend underlined exactly how much confidence is flowing through him right now.

On both occasions, he ran at the defenders with the air of a man who knew exactly what he was going to do. Others might have paused and waited for support, but he drove at the heart of the opposition defence, and they simply couldn’t live with him.

The fact that he scored the first goal of the game and then the final one to seal the 4-2 scoreline was also significant, showing that he was going strong at both the beginning and end of the match as he took the game away from a determined if limited Malaga side.

KIRILL KUDRYAVTSEV/Getty Images

As is always the case when a talented player emerges at Atletico, there will be plenty making admiring glances at Carrasco and perhaps offering him more riches and a higher profile elsewhere, but this has now become a club at which a young attacking talent can flourish with abandon.

That is certainly what he has been doing, and as goal after goal is proving, he has become a vital player for his side.

He shouldn’t be looking to leave a club where he has been playing so well for a while yet, and hopefully that is what the new contract should be signifying.

Only special players go on the type of goalscoring run that he has been producing in Spain, and Carrasco certainly is a special player.