The Uruguayan, at 34, has been sensational for Atlético. Not bad for a free transfer who Barcelona were desperate to get rid of“Madness,” Lionel Messi called it, but even he hadn’t imagined it being this mad.One Friday in September Messi walked into the dressing room at Barcelona’s San Joan Despí training ground and it hit him. After six years his best friend wasn’t there, so he sent him a message. “It’ll be strange seeing you in another shirt,” it said, and two days on he discovered how strange when Luis Suárez made his Atlético Madrid debut. Introduced as a sub against Granada, 90 seconds later, Suárez had provided an assist. By the end of the 90 minutes, he had scored...
Real Madrid’s third home league defeat of the campaign leaves them level on points with Barcelona, but 10 points adrift of leaders AtléticoRonald Koeman didn’t intend to speak for both of them and plenty thought he shouldn’t have spoken at all, but as it turned out that’s exactly what he did. It was just after midday on Saturday when the coach said Barcelona “are not in a position to win much” and just before 6pm when Real Madrid showed nor are they.By the following night, the greatest rivals in sport couldn’t be closer: same points, same wins, same draws, same defeats, same goals conceded. But if a battle is building, it’s not for anything that matters much, and the team...
An icy flight across Spain was in vain for Madrid as they were held in Pamplona while Atlêtico’s games in hand rack upAthletic Club Bilbao parked the bus but couldn’t land the plane. The driver arrived early and waited outside Barajas Terminal Four on Friday evening while thousands of feet above him the pilot bringing the team to Madrid to play Atlético circled the city before giving up and going home. At around the same time Real Madrid’s players were sitting in another plane on the runway, watching snow fall and time pass. To the south, Rayo Vallecano’s footballers got off the coach and helped push stranded cars along the road, or tried to. “Do you think we should be...
The final round of 2020 had a 1-0 win for the leaders, Iago Aspas tearing opponents apart and Barça underwhelming“We’ve had spectacular 2020,” said Koke Resurrección, which might not have fit the public mood exactly but maybe that was because there was still no public at all. There hadn’t been since the time they went to Liverpool nine months earlier, a night so good that Marcos Llorente got a puppy and called it Anfield. Since then, there had been silence. The very next afternoon, the doors closed, staying that way for 93 days. And although they reopened for the players, sent into a strange, sterile new world, they didn’t for the people, some of whom would never come back. Some...
Atlético Madrid defender has been suspended for 10 weeks but it is possible that he has done nothing or very little wrongEighteen years ago, shortly after Mick McCarthy had lost his job as the Republic of Ireland manager for the first time, some friends and I became privy to some inside information regarding the likely identity of his successor. It was so long ago I can’t remember how or where we learned the Football Association of Ireland mulling over a left-field appointment and ready to replace McCarthy with Philippe Troussier, a Parisian whose CV read more like that of a French foreign legion recruit than that of a jobbing manager.A 20-year career that had begun in France had taken Troussier...