Ian Hawkey
“A beautiful coincidence,” Diego Godin called it.
Immediately after he had headed home the goal that put Atletico Madrid on course for their first Spanish league title in 18 years last Saturday at Barcelona's Camp Nou, he was congratulated by Miranda, his partner at centre-half in one of Europe's meanest defences.
Miranda instinctively appreciated what Godin meant by beautiful coincidence.
In pictures: Real Madrid train for Uefa Champions League final
He saw the sweet symmetry. Exactly a year earlier, it had been Miranda, nodding in a cross in extra time, who won the Copa del Rey for Atletico, with Real Madrid the defeated team, the venue: the Bernabeu. There is a pattern here: In the space of 12 months, Spanish football's unusual standard-bearers, Madrid and Barca, have both been denied prizes by an Atletico who now set off for a Uefa Champions League final in Lisbon on Saturday emboldened by a terrific momentum of accumulated successes.
Not the least of what they have learnt through winning the Europa League, against Athletic Bilbao in 2012, the Copa del Rey in 2013 against Madrid and now the league against Barca, is that they have a stout rearguard. And, in it, a pair of stoppers who contribute decisively at the key moments.
Concerns ahead of the match with Real in Lisbon still surround the dubious fitness of their leading marksman, Diego Costa. But Atletico, not a team who regularly accumulate the six- or seven-goal wallopings that have been a characteristic of Barcelona and Madrid's dominance in the past five years, know they have finishers across the starting XI.
The “beautiful coincidence” joyously celebrated by the centre-halves Godin and Miranda last weekend was no arbitrary coincidence. Set-piece goals, elaborate manoeuvres at corners during free kicks are an area of Atletico’s expertise.
The ball did not happen to bump off Godin in the middle of a melee last Saturday; it thundered off the 5ft 4ins-tall Uruguayan’s forehead like a bullet.
Carlo Ancelotti, Madrid’s coach, will devote plenty of homework to what Atletico do from dead-ball scenarios, to studying where and how Gabi, Koke, Jose Sosa and Diego Ribas deliver the ball into the penalty area and to charting the runs that Godin, Miranda and midfielder Raul Garcia, in particular, make to meet those passes or to create a distraction.
“We are two teams who know each other well, so there aren’t too many secrets,” Ancelotti said. “Both coaches have their strategies and it’s a question of imposing them.”
No secrets? No surprise tactics? Bayern Munich were startled in the semi-final against Madrid, and particularly the goals from Sergio Ramos in the second leg.
They represented Madrid's "beautiful coincidence", one that propelled them to a first Champions League final in 12 years.
One up from the home leg, Ramos effectively settled the tie with replica strikes in the first 20 minutes in Munich. The first came via a header that made full use of his prodigious leap, to power home a corner from Luka Modric, while the second was the product of a lurching header after Pepe, his partner at centre-half, had flicked on an Angel di Maria free kick.
For the Real Madrid vice captain, an agonising wait was over. After three years of losing semi-finals, Ramos had dragged Madrid through their glass ceiling.
In pictures: Atletico Madrid train for Uefa Champions League final
He had done so against the club, Bayern, who finished up the winners two years ago in the semis against Madrid, partly because Ramos missed badly in the penalty shoot-out.
A European Cup, Ramos said on Tuesday, “is the little piece that’s missing from my personal record.”
In nine years at Madrid, he has won leagues and cups, and in the last six years with Spain, two European Championships and a World Cup. He has set some other personal records, too. Earlier this season, he became the most red-carded player in Real history, quite an achievement for a man of 28.
His total stands at 18, and he will soon have totted up his half-century of yellow cards. The red-mist, the raised elbows and upturned studs have been part of the Ramos package over the years.
“It’s easy to send off Sergio Ramos,” he recently complained, as if by talking about himself in the third person, he was somehow detached from the notorious, frustrating vice-captain of Madrid.
Aggression is part of Madrid’s game. Pepe exudes it, Ramos personifies it, and has done so since he was a prodigy at Sevilla, in his home city, the capital of Spanish bullfighting.
But he is far more than a pantomime villain. He has a technique on the ball fine enough to have played in midfield for Real, starred at right-back.
He has also converted a fair few free kicks not just because of his uncanny sense of how to time a run to meet a cross, but more directly. He has a precise, powerful right-footed shot from long range.
Godin is a more orthodox stopper. But he is no less a leader for Atletico than Sergio Ramos for Madrid.
He grew up admiring the legendary hardman centre-back of Uruguay and Juventus, Paolo Montero, a veteran of countless spiky confrontations with the game’s finest strikers in the 1990s and early 2000s.
Earlier this season, television cameras covering an Atletico-Barcelona game appeared to catch Godin signalling to teammates that Lionel Messi had a sore calf, and recommending they should make it sorer.
“In Uruguay, we are competitive, that’s part of our character,” Godin said.
He will compete intensely in Lisbon. A week after scoring the most important Atletico goal this century, he knows part of his task there is to outleap, out-tackle and out-think Ramos, and to make sure the Spaniard is carefully marked at set pieces.
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