da betano casino： They say that defensive football is boring. That the art of organising a team to be solid and nigh-on impenetrable is against the ideals of football, the idea of which is to out-score the opponent, not out-concede them.
da pinup bet： Those people might point to Jose Mourinho’s Manchester United at their most brazen, but they have clearly never watched Atletico Madrid in their pomp.
There may be no more thrilling sight in football than a blazing counter-attack where each player knows his job. To see a team go from defending to attacking in a whirlwind of a moment is exciting, but it’s the ruthlessness of the finish that makes it altogether more predatory. Like a lion downing a gazelle it is both brutal and oddly mesmeric. In order to achieve that, you have to lie in wait first.
At times over the last year and a bit, since Mourinho arrived at United, it’s the gladiatorial thrill of the counter we’ve been missing, apart from the first few games of this season. But when it came to the best of Atletico Madrid under Diego Simeone, that wasn’t the only reason games were enjoyable. There was a joy to watching them defend, too.
Importantly, though, it was a conspiratorial joy.
When you watched Atletico play – seemingly no matter who they were playing against – they’d never dominate the opposition. Everything was on edge, even until the last minutes. There would be a quality and a class in attack, players like Diego Costa and later Antoine Griezmann would let you know you were watching a top side. But there was something about watching them defend as a team which mesmerised as much as the passing motions of Barcelona in their pomp.
Diego Simeone gets the crowd involved. Everyone is a part. Everything is on edge. Atleti became a big team, La Liga champions in 2014 and Champions League finalists twice in three years, but rarely did they win even the small games by big margins, not like the big teams did. Indeed, that’s not what the crowd were there to see.
In fact, they didn’t arrive to see. They arrived to take part. The Vicente Calderon was filled with people whose job it was to roar the team on because the alternative was to bite their nails. The manager had convinced them that they were part of the war effort, and they had duly resolved to sing for victory.
All you had to do was look at the two banks of four moving in tandem to see the beauty, but a glance at the ball – always at the feet of an opponent – showed that it was all in the balance. One slight mistake from a defender was all it would take before it was gone.
It’s rare for a club to create a sense of community quite like that one, where there is a shared goal between players and fans, especially one which involved such intense concentration in defence. The aim is to entertain the crowd, but not through Pep Guardiola dominance: through the opposite. Fans were complicit in the result, and when you make the defensive performances heroic enough to be thrilling, it’s no longer ‘entertainment’, it’s an immersive experience.
Manchester United will never be Atletico Madrid. United are too big a club. They can never be the underdogs like Simeone’s side can. They don’t have a Real Madrid or a Barcelona to usurp, just noisy neighbours to silence now that Liverpool have long since been knocked off their perch.
The siege mentality that Mourinho creates among his players might well bear fruit in the end, but it’s hard for a fan to buy into that because there is no complicity. They aren’t involved, at least not in the same way. If they aren’t there to be entertained by attacking play, nor are they there to sing for victory, then why exactly are they turning up? And they will turn up, because they support their team, but a reason removes the wall.
This year, Atletico aren’t the same team. Their stadium move hinders and probably weakens them. There were always going to be teething problems and they may well overcome them in the future, maybe even this season, but there is something missing. At the Calderon, though, they were barely penetrable: the fans were complicit in the result and that in turn helped focus the team on the game itself.
That might sound like a strange concept, but it’s an important one which brings together the comparison between Atletico and Manchester United. Because if a style of football which is primarily about defensive organisation and individual attacking flair on the counter is to work in the long-term, then you can’t have your team defending like it’s a mathematical equation or an academic exercise. You can’t line up in two banks of four for the majority of every game. It gets boring for the players.
But, if you’re being willed to focus by 45,000 baying fans roaring at every clearance and tackle because they’re complicit in the result, then you’re not focusing on a ‘job’, but you’re defending something much more meaningful than that. And that’s not boring for anyone involved, players of fans.
Jose Mourinho’s problem is that, in the long term, performances like his two at Anfield in his time at United aren’t possible unless you create that same sort of complicity between fans and players. It’s true that you can’t create that in one transitional season, but the worry is that he won’t actually try. And if he doesn’t, he might end up like quite a few performances like he got against Huddersfield, when his players, perhaps lacking motivation because of their rigid and unadventurous style of play, simply failed to turn up in the first half.
But even if he does attempt to string together an overarching philosophy like Simeone did in Spain, one of the reasons why Atletico were such a force in Europe, and why they were, counter-intuitively, such a joy to watch, was because they always felt like the underdogs. Manchester United, on the other hand, are English football’s most successful club and three-time winners of the European Cup. They will never be underdogs, and may never even want to be.
And that’s the sticking point. Mourinho can win the league playing football in such a way. He may even win Champions Leagues. But at a club like Manchester United, will he ever be able to create a situation like Diego Simeone did, where heroic defensive performances are thrilling, not drab 0-0s against the club’s biggest and bitterest rivals?
If not, he might have to learn to out-score even the biggest teams, not just out-concede them.
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