Sid Lowe is our Spanish football correspondent, based in Madrid, and has been covering an increasingly busy beat for years. He answers your questions
Goatse asks: Has there ever been such loud, blanket, across-the-board outrage at Atlético’s playing style from both the Spanish media and from Spanish fans as there has been around Arsenal from the English media and other clubs’ fans for the past few months?
Sid:
Difficult to answer this because to be honest I’m not entirely sure about the UK media/societal/fan response to Arsenal. But, not being RM or FCB, having a defensive identity (previously, but it lingers here too), having a coach like Simeone, I would say that Atlético fans will feel that they have felt the finger of accusation pointing at them often as well … I’m not sure I would call it outrage, or across the board, but the accusation of anti-football, boring, etc … all that is there I guess.
It’s not all cliche of course, and cliches and stereotypes are often rooted in some truth. I remember an opposition coach coming past me after a game at Atlético once, years ago in fairness, and saying “Christ, they’re a horrible team, aren’t they?”
Atlético have changed a lot since then … or sort of. Their title challenge, insofar as there was ever one, was over by Christmas really and there have been evolutions, shifts, changes in form. I think there’s a momentum and a clarity about them now that wasn’t there before. An obvious, if simplistic example: Antoine Griezmann and Koke were supposed to be getting phased out but are among the best and will play now. Griezmann is sensational. Marcos Llorente has been full-back and midfielder, and is a freak of nature.
It feels like every year there’s this almost existential debate about what Atlético are and at some point along the way they sort of find themselves. What they are not, by the way, is what so many people seem to think they are. “We attack better than we defend,” Diego Simeone says and he is right. In terms of the last Arsenal game and this one, I guess there’s the change in Arsenal themselves and also the very basic thing which is that it is a different context now than in the league phase.