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Pre-Season Results Haven’t Been Great, but Atletico Madrid Are Ready for 2016/17
- Updated: August 14, 2016
There are no dress rehearsals from here on out, with Atletico Madrid a week away from opening what promises to be a fascinating La Liga season with a home match against newly promoted Alaves next Sunday.
Could the preparation have gone better? That won’t be revealed until next weekend, but the trip to Cadiz for the Ramon de Carranza Trophy would have at least sharpened minds and bodies, even if it didn’t deliver the trophy itself.
On Friday, a late—and it is fair to say controversial—penalty ensured that the hosts Cadiz earned a 1-1 draw with Atletico, which meant that their clash went to a penalty shootout, where Fernando Torres, Yannick Ferreira Carrasco and Jose Gimenez all missed to hand victory to the hosts from the Segunda Division.
That can hardly be seen as appropriate preparation for the new campaign given how the old one ended for Diego Simeone’s side in Milan against Real Madrid, but nobody was taking defeat too harshly as they headed into the tournament’s third-place playoff match against a Nigerian All-Star team.
Again, that was a tough warm-up against a committed, physical side full of players looking to impress.
With Kevin Gameiro making his first start in Atletico colours, it was another new arrival, Nico Gaitan, who gave Atletico the lead with his second goal of pre-season in the first half.
The expected goal glut never arrived in the second period, though—and you can worry about that if you want, as the Nigerian team was beaten 4-1 by Malaga the previous evening—but after Abdulrahman Bashir grabbed a shock equaliser for the underdogs, it was left to Diego Godin to pop up a minute from time to win the match with his second goal of pre-season.
The first of those came against Tottenham in Australia right at the start of the summer, and it is probably right to say that the English side were the strongest opponents that Atletico faced over a pre-season which took them from Down Under to Italy, and not via Turkey as had …
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