Atletico Madrid's Season Reaches a New Low with Embarrassing Villarreal Defeat

There’s no hiding from this one. No shrugging it off and pretending that it was just a blip, or just a temporary drop-off in form. It has long become much more than that.

Atletico Madrid’s disappointing La Liga season reached a new low point with the 3-0 defeat at Villarreal on Monday night. Lower than the defeat by the same scoreline in the Madrid derby last month, lower than the losses to Sevilla and Real Sociedad earlier in the season, and lower than the dropped home points that have blighted 2016/17 throughout.

This looked like a team nearing the end of a cycle, and a manager struggling to impose his iron will upon them as they disintegrated into the Valencian evening.

Everything that we have come to associate with Diego Simeone’s Atletico Madrid vanished into thin air on Monday night, when instead it was the team in yellow who were pressing and harrying and getting into the faces of their opposition, giving them little time to breathe.

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Perhaps, in a curious train of thought, Simeone should take it as a compliment.

He spent years trying to elevate Atletico to the status of La Liga royalty, only to be usurped now by teams using variations on his own tactics.

Villarreal joined Sevilla and Sociedad in sitting above Atletico in the league table on Monday night, leaving their opponents marooned down in sixth. It is somewhere Atleti never thought that they would be come the season’s start, when keeping pace with Barcelona and Real Madrid would have been the aim, not this.

Twelve points now separate them from the club in top spot in the table, but there seems to be an awful lot more that separates them from Real Madrid than that.

Where Zinedine Zidane’s side are purposeful, powerful and, more importantly, full of character if the weekend’s last-gasp win over Deportivo La Coruna is anything to go by, Atletico suddenly look callow and out of ideas.

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Whereas once they’d have roared on to the pitch with a determination and desire, there now seems to be a fear that accompanies their games, something that the proudly fearless Simeone must find unacceptable to witness.

For his part, there was the usual post-match platitudes and suggestions that things could have been different if only the fine details of the match were altered, and while that is true in part, he must know that it isn’t enough.

He told Atletico’s official webste:

"

I think that in the first half we had four chances. [Antoine] Griezmann’s hit to the post, [Kevin] Gamerio’s and [Angel] Correa’s, and Villarreal, obviously, took advantage of the chances it had to score, it made them be more comfortable in the match.

I go away with the feeling that the team fights, works… that the team is trying its best to find the best situations to win and in the last games, especially when trying to score, we’re not having luck and that makes us lose. We have to work, because it’s the only way to improve.

"

You could almost have taken those exact same words and trotted them out at the end of Atletico’s other disappointing results this season, and although what the manager is saying is broadly true, it doesn’t seem helpful at a time when swift improvement is needed.

But you can’t accuse Simeone of not trying to be different as he looks to put things right.

He dropped Yannick Ferreira Carrasco here after the Belgian’s previously stellar form this season had gone away in the past few weeks, while the swift and brutal withdrawal of the veteran midfielder Tiago so soon after his error helped give Villarreal the lead through Manuel Trigueros was a bold move.

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But these decisions had the air of reactive, rather than proactive about them.

Simeone has made his name as a manager not scared of taking on the elite, with his tactics often designed at drawing all he can out of a game before the swift and decisive blow is administered to the back of the opposition’s net. That just isn’t happening now.

While the more pleasing-on-the-eye, expansive approach was something that everyone who watches the club on a regular basis agreed was the best move was welcomed at the start of the season, it just seems to have diluted Atletico now.

They are suddenly caught in the middle of their old ways and new, struggling to be either as they lack the identity that had gatecrashed European football’s top table in the past few seasons.

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They are still performing well in the Champions League, but as has been proved with other teams in that competition this season—the likes of struggling Premier League champions Leicester City, and Borussia Dortmund, who won Real Madrid’s Champions League group despite being down in sixth in the Bundesliga—marrying domestic and continental form is a difficult task.

All of this is bound to be striking a chord with Antoine Griezmann, who, on the night he found out he was the third-best player in the world, was ambling around El Madrigal unable to place much of an influence on proceedings.

It’s true that he could have scored just moments after Trigueros’s opener for the home side, only to be denied by a fine stop from Villarreal’s former Atletico goalkeeper Sergio Asenjo, but the Frenchman was cutting a frustrated figure long before that. He has to wonder just what level he could take his game up to were he playing in a more functional, attacking side, and it could well be that he’s about to enter his final year as an Atletico player.

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It wasn’t Griezmann but Jan Oblak who dominated the post-match headlines, though, with the Slovenian sustaining a shoulder injury in the act of conceding Villarreal’s second goal to Jonathan dos Santos, and the goalkeeper was forced off before the half-time whistle.

Simeone called the blow “the worst thing” to come out of the game for Atletico, as well as claiming that the injury “upset” his team—both via ESPN FC.

It seemed to be the type of comment that he would never have made when Atletico were riding high in the table, heading into games with the belief that they could challenge their illustrious opponents at the top end of the table.

Have they become soft now? Well, they aren’t themselves any more.

Goals are being conceded at an alarming rate, and there looks to be little that Simeone can do to prevent that as long as his players seem to be lacking the desire and organisation that he so prides himself on.

This is a real struggle for them right now, and it makes fixtures such as Saturday’s home clash with Las Palmas one to worry about rather than enter with any real confidence.

Atletico just need the winter break now, and they need to regroup.