This is not a repeat of 2013-14: Atlético are playing expansive football and cemented their favourites tag against BarcelonaLate on Saturday night, not long after his players had beaten Barcelona 1-0, immortalised a moment even they hadn’t experienced before with a celebratory photo taken in an improvised recovery room beneath the stands and headed home still in their kit, Diego Simeone sat in an empty auditorium and started another Zoom call. A series of journalists appeared on screen, taking it in turns attempting to get him to say Atlético Madrid are going to win the league. Or at least try to. One by one they failed, until somebody asked if he saw any similarities between this team and the one...
With individualists such as Özil and Pogba sadly marginalised, Atlético’s £110m man shows the classic No 10 still has a placeIn 19th-century Russian literature there was a recurrent figure known as The Superfluous Man. The Superfluous Man was talented, aimless, wealthy and pretty much redundant in society. He wrote poetry and wore finely stitched britches. He lounged on silken pouffes and was pointlessly good at pointless things. The world coddled and cosseted him. But it didn’t need him any more.It isn’t hard to find a few of these, our own Superfluous Men, in modern day football. This has been a constant note in the last year, the trend for a certain type of player, individualists with non-standard skills, to find...
In a debut lasting less than 23 minutes, Atlético’s new signing won and lost a penalty, hit the post and scored two goalsThere was a smattering of applause from the 60 or 70 people sitting in the shade of the stand and then someone started shouting: “Uruguayo! Uruguayo!” Luis Suárez’s number had been up a while, forced to wait a couple more minutes for his Atlético Madrid debut, but now his time had come. He stood pitchside with Thomas Partey and Marcos Llorente watching Diego Costa walk his way. Briefly they embraced and then he set off towards the sunshine, greeting João Félix as he went. It was 5.31pm on the first day of Atlético’s season and their new signing...
Liverpool were utterly dominant but could not deliver the killer blow and allowed a defiant Atlético to come back from the dead Midway through this second leg, as the black shirts fell back into their carefully-stitched patterns, as Liverpool’s players struggled a little in their familiar home spaces, it was hard to avoid the feeling of a pair of hands reaching almost imperceptibly for the lapels, the clavicle, and finally the throat. This was a beautifully controlled strangulation, enacted in plain sight by Diego Simeone’s Atlético Madrid.But it was also a heist, a rearguard victory during which the Atlético goal seemed to be protected by some invisible membrane, sealed within a kind of high-strength footballing clingfilm. Related: Atlético Madrid and...
The Atlético Madrid manager was at his whirling, grizzled best as his side claimed a first-leg advantage against LiverpoolJürgen Klopp stood and watched the referee pull the yellow card from his pocket, a symbol of his frustration, while to his right Diego Simeone raised the roof. Up and down the touchline Atlético Madrid’s manager went, wildly waving, clenching his fists, urging on the fans. Come on, he called, the coach conductor once more. Louder and louder they got, singing, flags waving, scarves whirling, all looking at him, all of them so alive. For Simeone, it has never been just about the players; it is about the place. And this place was his, like never before.With two minutes left, victory was...