Yannick Carrasco’s Fine Atletico Madrid Form Rewards Diego Simeone for Changing

If the new Atletico Madrid mantra in La Liga is to score goals, then it is very much “same old, same old” in the Champions League.

Three games, three wins, all by one goal to nil. It is pretty standard Atletico stuff, and on Wednesday night it was the Russian side Rostov who were on the receiving end of it.

Yannick Carrasco—the scorer of a hat-trick in the league at the weekend and the winner in Atletico’s previous Champions League game against Bayern Munich—was the hero once again, popping up just after the hour mark to turn what had been a comfortable evening into an advantage on the scoresheet.

And it was an advantage Atletico held on to thanks to their strong and familiar defence.

Manager Diego Simeone might have made alterations to his team elsewhere—starting with Fernando Torres over Kevin Gameiro, and then introducing the French forward in place of Angel Correa shortly before the goal as Atletico went with three up top—but still he sticks by what has become a tried and tested rearguard.

Goalkeeper Jan Oblak and the back four of Filipe Luis, Stefan Savic, Diego Godin and Juanfran have now all played in almost every minute of the Champions League run so far, with the only alteration seeing Jose Gimenez come in for Savic in the opener at PSV Eindhoven. He gave away a penalty, but Oblak saved it anyway.

That is now 270 minutes without conceding a goal in this season’s Champions League, the sturdiest of foundations and the sort of thing upon which great successes can be built.

There may come a time in the season when Simeone has to wonder just where this competition fits into his list of priorities.

Atletico are, after all, sitting on the top of the Liga table. They’ve made a brighter start to the campaign than looked possible after the first couple of games, and for all of Barcelona and Real Madrid’s often mesmerising brilliance, they are the team which looks the most convincing in Spain.

It might be that the league title is the thing which needs to be prioritised later in the campaign, but that doesn’t necessarily need to be the case now.

As we discussed before this trip to Russia, a win was actually going to help in the league challenge even though they are different competitions. With nine points from nine available and a further nine left to play for, Atletico are as good as …

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