Atletico do it again to further push point of what are Arsenal doing? by KM
Hello everybody! Ah the Champions League we all so desperately fight for! Or At least Arsene does for that precious fourth spot! And when he gets it, next year we face up Bayern or Barcelona and exit the competition. But when the elusive (for Arsene) rounds of the champions league come you can clearly see why others can compete and we cannot.
Atletico de Madrid is one of the bigger clubs in Spain, but the gap between the bigger and smaller clubs over at the Iberian peninsula is much greater with Real Madrid and Barcelona earning almost half of the money if not even more, rather than it is in England where TV money is relatively equally distributed. This makes their success all the more astonishing.
So what is it down to? Hard work. They outran Bayern yesterday and despite having less of the ball they made the most of it! True their style isn’t the prettiest, but the Calderon is a place with boiling atmosphere where any team in the world would struggle. There are many talented players, but hard work beats talent alone and the Atletico players were amazing.
The moment the ball was lost, there were flying tackles, regrouping at the back, lots of running towards the person with the ball and no free spaces for opposition players to play. And the control on the ball was sublime. Did you see that goal? Niguez didn’t have anyone to pass the ball to, so he slipped past the entire Bayern defense and scored a beauty past Neuer. If Messi had done that there would be heaps of praise, but a 21 year old local academy boy did it for Atleti.
Will you ever see an Arsenal lad (with all my respect for them) do this against Bayern on the biggest stage? No way, but why is that? We don’t have the confidence. Atleti players may not match the quality of Bayern, but confidence wise they are flying! They have the belief they can do anything, and it comes from the manager.
Atleti lost Falcao (when he was actually good), then it was Felipe Luis, Cortouis and Costa to Chelsea (although Luis returned to Atleti), Miranda to Inter and still they are a major factor. Do you hear Simeone complain about how big Real and Barca and Bayern are? Complain about bad luck, injuries or money?
Truth is with recent examples of Borrussia Dortmund, Atletico and now Leicester it is living proof in front of our eyes that it’s not only money. We lack character, desire, passion, discipline and a little bit of quality, but it’s not something that money can buy and we do have enough of them. I saw a comment on this site that calculated how Wenger spend over 260 million in the past 5 years. Not that little of a sum don’t you think?
We need change! Hopefully the Norwich game will be start of one. Be part of it!
Konstantin