The Manchester United already appears in the present of Atlético de Madrid in the round of 16 of the Champions League, between the acceleration of Joao felixdefinitive to revive his team in the face of the crisis in El Sadar, and the doubts of the rojiblanco team, which lightened some of the weight of their concerns with the victory in Pamplona under the leadership of the Portuguese attacker, who is running as the starter and protagonist in Wednesday’s challenge.
Atlético have only won 13 of the last 33 points played in the League, but, just as true, that those 13 points are concentrated in the seven days most recent (four wins, one draw and two losses), who kept a clean sheet away from the Wanda Metropolitano for the first time in the course and who ended a streak of seven duels without winning in all competitions away from home, since beat Porto on December 7.
An “important injection emotionally”, according to the midfielder Hector Herrerafor the challenge that awaits this Wednesday in the first leg of the Champions League round of 16 against Manchester United, to which a footballer like Joao felixvindicated more than anyone in the victory in Pamplona, with a goal, an assist and above all a decisive factor that is what his team needs.
The step forward of the Portuguese striker, back in the starting lineup two games later, is an incentive for Atlético’s confidence and that of the footballer himself, who has moved in the reasonable doubt that his progression has not been as impressive as was intuited when He signed for the club two and a half years ago (this Saturday he completed a hundred games, with 23 goals), for various reasons.
Not all of them are your responsibility, but many are. He has not yet triumphed at Atlético because he has not knocked down the door, because all his indisputable qualities, because his driving, his dribbling, his movements, his shots, his speed and, in short, all his high-level football has only been seen in specific sections.
And because inconstancy is among his most visible deficits since he arrived at Atlético. And when he found her, last season, the blows suffered in his right ankle, with a broken bone with which he played for six months, reduced his formidable start to the 2020-21 season.
He has not had any luck in that sense either. Joao, nor has it found the indisputable role that others do have in the scheme of Diego Simeone. He had it in that “year of transition” of the team that the Argentine coach spoke of in 2019-20, which was also a year of adaptation for Joao. He concluded it as a substitute -and as a scorer- in the duel against Leipzig in the quarterfinals of the Champions League, in a single game, when football was still being redirected after the Covid-19 pandemic that changed the world.
That season, the Portuguese striker was a regular starter for Simeone, more at the beginning of the campaign than at the end, but almost always in eleven. Of the 36 games available, he started in 28. 77 percent. He scored nine goals and provided three assists. He averaged a goal every four games.
And he continued in eleven at the beginning of the following year, the one that should have been his definitive ‘explosion’ as a rojiblanco, but in the end it was not. This is what his start pointed out: 11 games, nine starts, seven goals and three assists. It was unanswerable. Unstoppable for his rivals. It was his most conclusive stretch at Atlético, until a blow to his right ankle, the discomfort of which he had dragged on ever since, stopped the attacker, who lost his game, prominence and, above all, his place in the line-ups of Simeone. Sometimes he was in them, sometimes he wasn’t.
“At the beginning I was very good, then I got injured and played for six months with a broken foot bone. People didn’t know, they only found out after the surgery (when he had surgery on his right foot at the end of the European Championship, last summer ). It was my choice to play that way to try to help the team. It was difficult but I felt part of this, part of the team”, he expressed this February in an interview with ‘The Athletic’.
From 77 percent of starts in the first campaign or 75 of the first twelve duels of that course, he went to 48 percent of the next 29 games, 14 as a starter, in which he added just three goals and three assists, compared with its resounding start.
Already recovered from those inconveniences, his role has not changed this campaign. He is not a regular starter, far from it, not even when Antoine Griezmann He has been out due to injury, within a current habitat of the team that does not favor anyone either. Much less to him, always under the focus of the demand, although his match against Granada expressed everything that can be at the end of December and although the duel against Osasuna vindicated him as one of the most decisive footballers who can get Atlético out of an alley in which United appears.
will form Joao in the starting eleven? He points to this, although today he is half the starter of what he could be (he has played 52 percent of the duels that have been available this season, 13 of 25), with four goals, four assists and already one hundred games with Atlético, in the transition towards his emergence as a fantastic player, in a constant examination whose next test is incomparable: United of Cristiano Ronaldo.