In a week where he bested Pep Guardiola and earned an three-game ban for orchestrating a ball-boy led defense of a counterattack, Diego Simeone can be forgiven if he hasn’t realised he has twigged the radar of one Sam Allardyce.
Allardyce’s Sunderland travel to Stoke today to try and eek their way out of the relegation mire and Big Sam in a move that surely seemed masterly to him, used his plinth to make a wider point about perception in the Premier League.
“It's an art, defending - everybody has forgotten that - it's a tactical art to be able to sense danger and block people's crosses and get your toe in without fouling them now, and they are very, very good at it indeed.
"The whole team buys into it. You see Fernando Torres on the edge of his own box defending. You never saw that at Liverpool or Chelsea.
"That's how good the manager is and that's why they are successful. They are successful because they concede fewer goals than everybody else and only need one to win in.
Now, everybody can say, 'Well, that's not entertaining', but everybody is eulogising Simeone's tactics now. I wouldn't think they would do that in the Premier League so much. 'He's boring ,this guy, he defends too much' - that's what he'd get here.”
The underlying thread of Allardyce’s argument - that he and the guy who’s done the most impressive managerial job in Europe the past five years are basically the same - is delivered with the subtlety of a Lee Cattermole tackle. Throughout his Premier League career, Allardyce has been Principal Skinner chasing down Bart: ‘Am I so out of touch? No, it’s the children who are wrong’.
The rise of Simeone’s team is the perfect thing for him to readdress the balance and counter the labels that have followed him. But what Big Sam fails to take into account is the perception of resources and the difference between surviving and prospering and how it affects the casual fan’s attitude towards a team.
Plenty have lauded the togetherness, toughness and defensive stability of Leicester City this season. Yet no one has much love for Jose Mourinho’s relentlessly and similarly effective first Chelsea iteration. Atletico are also the beneficiaries of this perception game.
That they have to eternally fight with Barcelona and Real Madrid makes incidents such as the ball boy preventing a Malaga counterattack last week almost seem rascally and charming. It was a remarkable incident: clearly Simeone didn’t just have a flash of Machiavellian inspiration; there’s a quick nod to the ball boy and then a ball on the pitch.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=InGAyKxIvCw
We have to assume there was a conversation before the game or perhaps a directive before the season. One wonders what the outcry would have been if someone such as Mourinho did similar.
Yet, it’s largely forgiven. El Cholo, in his customary all black and looking like he should be duking it out with a mullet-haired Mel Gibson in one of the early Lethal Weapon films, can dabble with the dark arts and be lauded for it.
On Wednesday, they hassled and harried Bayern into submission. The opening twenty minutes were a whirlwind for the German champions as Atletico tore into them and displayed the type of controlled madness that knocks even the smoothest of players off their stride. On more than one occasion, Antoine Griezmann could be found in his own box, clearing the ball or becoming yet another obstacle for Bayern to overcome. Arturo Vidal was targeted for wind-up treatment, while Robert Lewandowski could be forgiven for checking to see if the outstanding José Giménez was still following him on the flight back to Munich.
The story of Atletico’s season is poised to be the last great ideological debate between RTE’s football panel before it’s forever broken by the departure of John Giles. Eamon Dunphy was purring after Diego Godin and co stopped Barcelona in the quarter finals and he clashed with the panels heart Liam Brady in the aftermath of that game.
Brady is forever in the corner of the team that’s trying to play while Dunphy finds beauty in every aspect. But the spectacle of Atletico is beginning to wear thin even for Dunphy as he bemoaned how far Simeone’s warriors retreated back on Wednesday night. It’s a debate that will rumble up until the final.
It’s frequently war language we use in association with Atletico, players put their bodies on the fine. They show guts. They run themselves into the ground. Before the Bayern tie, Simeone spoke of how it would be the team that used their soldiers better that would win. Everything is a battle, everything is a struggle and that’s the central appeal of this team.
It will forever be a paradox of football fandom that we are prepared to forgive a team like Atletico for stopping first and playing second and punishing a team like Bayern if they did similar. But football fans are undoubtedly prepared to forgive perceived negativity if it means over achievement.
Defending is an art as Allardyce pointed out and Simeone’s great success is inspiring warmth for his defensive structure and making people forget about the general spectacle and shy away from his moments of cynicism. The fact that he seesm like a man who will do anything to win is almost mischievous not sinister.
Atletico’s season is the story of the struggle, the story of the war but they are trying to conquer, Allardyce is forever trying to survive.
And surviving is boring.
