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Sid LoweSpain writer
Ralf Rangnick wasn’t happy, and nor were the fans throwing bottles at Diego Simeone as he sprinted up the touchline, dodged missiles and ducked into the tunnel in the corner of Old Trafford. At the end of Manchester United’s Champions League elimination on Tuesday night, their manager complained about Atletico Madrid’s “time-wasting antics,” grumbling: “I don’t know if the game as played more than two minutes without being interrupted with someone lying on the floor.”
“Their style is not really for me to comment on,” the United captain Harry Maguire said. “But” — and you knew there was a ‘but’ coming — “every time you touch them, they go down and it’s a foul. They sit behind the ball, but they have numerous numbers you have to break down and when you give them the first goal it makes life so much harder … they sit back and it’s hard to create something.”
An almost sinister style, as one many English match reports had it, a team employing all the “old tricks”. According to The i, “this was s—housery at its most cynical”, and it wasn’t just them. The Guardian described Atletico as “scrapping and s—housing”, “happy to indulge in the darker arts,” while The Daily Mail as “more than a little tricky”, noting “there were plenty of delays, plenty of agonising injuries followed by miraculous recoveries once precious time had been taken.”
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Go on Twitter — better still, don’t — and it was a little stronger: dirty, defensive, nasty, boring. Cheats.
“They have been playing like this for ten years; it’s the way they play,” Rangnick said.
It was easy to imagine Simeone listening in as his opposite number spoke, reading all those things that were…
Source : espn
