Atletico Madrid Show Capacity to Never Make It Easy for Themselves at Valencia

Atletico Madrid’s determination to do things the hard way seems to know no bounds.

Because of the qualities instilled in them by manager Diego Simeone, the great battlers of Spanish and European football seem to want to work hard for everything they can get.

It is, of course, an admirable quality, but their ever-nervous fans must wish that things were a little easier at least some of the time.

With this latest win at Valencia, their team went to the top of the La Liga table for a few hours at least, but yet again the three points were tougher to achieve than they should have been. As is the Atletico way.

To the outsider looking in, the fact that their second goal only came in stoppage time in a 2-0 win—echoing the one goal successes in the previous game against Bayern Munich and the one before that against Deportivo La Coruna—would only mean one thing.

In their eyes this would have been the same old defensive Atleti, the team controlling the game and just doing the bare minimum in an attacking sense to win it—as is Simeone’s wont.

You can view that approach as negatively as you want—although it has broad positives against the biggest sides such as Bayern—but it wasn’t in evidence here.

This was a 2-0 win that was about as convincing as a 2-0 win gets. It should have been 4-0, and it might have been 6-0.

That it wasn’t was down to a variety of factors, but before we get on to the most obvious one, we should at least pay tribute to the opponents.

This was undoubtedly a better Valencia to the one we’ve seen in La Liga so far, with the presence of their new coach, the ex-Italy manager Cesare Prandelli, in the stands doubtless driving the team on. Los Che have always had talented individuals, but they just seem to have lost their way a little recently.

Driven on by an always passionate Mestalla crowd, they didn’t exactly take the fight to their visitors, but they were determined to stay solid.

Atletico felt their way into the game, and it took them a while to dominate it, but once they did—from about the 25th minute onwards—there was only one deserving winner. That there should even have been a question about that was as much down to Atletico’s DNA as anything else.

Because, unlike Barcelona …

continue reading in source www.bleacherreport.com