MADRID — Many issues occurred on the Wanda Metropolitano within the remaining 10 or 20 minutes, those that appeared to stretch on and on, gone the ultimate whistle, till they nearly constituted one other self-contained bonus sport, a separate third installment of a scheduled two-part drama.
There was some hair-pulling. There was various time-wasting. There was a full-scale brawl, dozens and dozens of gamers and staff workers members all streaming right down to a nook of the sector to make their opinions identified. There was a flurry of yellow playing cards, and a shiny, indignant pink. There was Diego Simeone, conducting his orchestra, urging the stadium to bay and to howl and to snarl till the final breath.
What there was not, the one factor lacking, was a lot precise soccer. There have been flashes, in fact, Atlético Madrid charging ahead, desperately looking the purpose that might break Manchester Metropolis’s resistance and take the sport into additional time, lengthen their keep within the Champions League for one more half-hour or, simply possibly, one other few weeks. For essentially the most half, although, these limitless previous few minutes had been a research within the artwork of not enjoying soccer.
That’s, in fact, very a lot a part of Atlético Madrid’s id. Simeone has spent a decade crafting a staff in his personal picture, one which performs, simply as he did, with a “knife between its tooth.”
Atlético ought to, by rights, be a heroic underdog amongst Europe’s elite, a countercultural various to the hegemony of urgent and possession. It doesn’t, in spite of everything, have the sources of its overweening neighbor, Actual Madrid, not to mention the state-backed clout of Manchester Metropolis or Paris St.-Germain, and but it refuses to wilt, to succumb to monetary inevitability.
It’s a potent testomony to Simeone’s work, then, and to the nice effectiveness of his inculcation, that his staff can so simply and so regularly play the position of the Champions League’s apparent villain: a aspect of cynics, provocateurs and cutthroats, designed and constructed to attract the sweetness and the soul from the sport, completely satisfied to subvert any norm accessible in pursuit of victory, and in defiance of conference, its opponents and the sport’s sense of ethical rectitude.
And but, in all the hearth and fury, it was not solely Atlético that realized that a spot within the semifinals hung not on expertise and method however on grit and grizzle, on a willingness to do no matter it takes.
There isn’t a staff extra related to magnificence than Pep Guardiola’s Manchester Metropolis. He has come, through the years, to face as an embodiment of soccer’s greater values, its final arbiter of style, its aesthete in chief. Guardiola means sophistication and magnificence, and he has imbued all of that into the staff he has constructed.
These weren’t the virtues, although, that allowed his staff to flee Madrid unscathed, its place in a Champions League semifinal with Actual Madrid secured, its chase for a home and European treble intact. Metropolis didn’t beat Atlético by overcoming its darkish arts. It beat Atlético by borrowing them.
A few of them, a minimum of. Identical to its host, Guardiola’s staff, for as soon as, didn’t appear particularly excited by enjoying soccer, both. It performed, as an alternative, for time. Each throw-in appeared to take an age, and each free kick and each purpose kick, too. No harm was shaken off; even essentially the most minor bump and bruise warranted an prolonged interval of therapy. Balls that had run out of play had been knocked just a bit farther down the road, out of the attain of Atlético’s gamers. No slight was too minor to not be met with indignation.
That shouldn’t be learn as a criticism of Manchester Metropolis; removed from it. Usually, it’s so straightforward to be dazzled by the brilliance of Guardiola’s aspect that its character, its braveness, is neglected. His document within the Premier League, particularly, in recent times has been constructed as a lot on defensive parsimony as attacking menace. Metropolis doesn’t wilt and it doesn’t doubt; it retains going, remorselessly, absolute in its conviction that will probably be proved proper in the long run.
Because the Metropolitano — this smooth, fashionable stadium constructed by the success of Simeone — one way or the other morphed into the Vicente Calderón, Atlético’s crumbling, intimidating, nakedly hostile former dwelling, what carried Metropolis by way of was not its magic however its mettle. That’s as a lot a part of Guardiola’s recipe as the rest.
And nor, for that matter, ought to or not it’s learn as a criticism of Atlético. “What issues greater than something in soccer is successful,” Simeone stated after the sport, not lengthy after the gamers had confronted one another within the tunnel as soon as extra. “It doesn’t matter the way you do it.”
Even Guardiola conceded that Atlético had come near successful, that it might need scored, might need gained, if it had solely possessed just a bit extra luck. “They’d the actions to attain,” he stated. “We needed to dwell this example. We needed to endure. We had been in large, large hassle.” On one other night time, in one other world, he appeared to say, all the things may have been very totally different.
That Simeone’s staff had been in a position to run Metropolis so shut was not regardless of its brinkmanship, however due to it. As Atlético did what it does, in these remaining jiffy, because the sense of shock outdoors the steep concrete banks of the Metropolitano began to construct, so too did the noise inside it. The group responded to its staff’s snapping and growling, ratcheting up the strain just a bit extra, shifting issues imperceptibly within the host’s favor. Atlético just isn’t the way in which it’s for enjoyable. It’s the manner it’s as a result of it really works.
“They know the way to do that higher than some other staff on the planet,” Guardiola stated. No person, anyplace, doesn’t play soccer higher than Atlético Madrid.
Guardiola sounded impressed, in a manner. He is aware of there are occasions when that’s what issues, that’s what counts. He is aware of that his staff will, at instances, have to be a bit of like Atlético Madrid whether it is to return right here and have fun once more in just a few weeks’ time, whether it is to climb the one peak it’s but to scale, to say the Champions League.
