Simeone: “I looked at the Clásico and said ‘we eliminated Barcelona twice, my God'”

The coach of Atlético de Madrid, Diego Pablo Simeone, upon watching the League Classic between FC Barcelona and Real Madrid, highlighted this Monday that his team has eliminated Hansi Flick’s team “twice” in the Champions League and Copa del Rey Mapfre, because they are “the team that plays the best in the world.”

“We have a minimal possibility of, if we do well on these three dates and Villarreal lose a game, going to play the last game with a chance of being third. It is the only thing we would have as a real objective,” acknowledged the coach of the red-and-white team in the press conference prior to matchday 36 in LaLiga EA Sports against Osasuna.

Looking ahead to this Tuesday’s match in Pamplona (9:30 p.m.), he announced that “some boys” from the youth team will participate, as in previous days away from the Riyadh Air Metropolitano, “due to the absences” of the team, to which defenders Nahuel Molina and Jose María Giménez have joined. “I hope they continue to take advantage of this beautiful opportunity to play in the first team,” said Simeone, who celebrated that the Uruguayan’s injury was “a sprained ankle.”

“He is a very strong person, he has been through a thousand battles like this and he will surely make it to the World Cup, he deserves it, and I hope he can compete in the best possible way with Uruguay, because the World Cup is what is closest to him,” he said about the center back who will not play the rest of the season with the Colchonero team due to his injury.

Asked again by the captain of the team, Koke Resurrección, he reiterated that he has not yet spoken to him about the future. “There are five times more (in reference to the remaining press conferences) that we have to see each other, so let’s change the questions because it’s going to be difficult,” he suggested.

“They are cycles that obviously change, they are moments that the group and the team will have to go through and the footballers who come will have to have that personality to occupy important places,” he said about the departure of important players like Antoine Griezmann.

Regarding the number of injuries that are occurring in this last stretch of the season with the World Cup just around the corner, the red and white coach highlighted that “it is a great shame” that this possibility exists. “There is a lot of investment, a lot of people who put in a lot of money, who care a lot about what a World Cup represents. The last one, in December, there were not so many injuries prior to the World Cup, and the players arrived in a certain way. Now it is very adjusted to this type of events, which are enormously important for everything,” he commented.

“It would be necessary to observe it because it is not a minor detail that the important footballer, who is seen throughout the season, just when the World Cup comes, he is not there,” added Simeone who did not want to evaluate the season. “It would be good to answer it at another time because surely the specialists would say that all the things I say would be excuses because we didn’t win anything,” he declared.

Finally, Simeone congratulated FC Barcelona for winning “a well-deserved League” that it has dominated from “beginning to end with incredible forcefulness”, like “last year”. “Barça is the team that possibly plays the best in the world. Congratulations to them, because they play incredible and I looked at yesterday’s game (the Clásico) and said ‘we eliminated Barcelona twice, my God,'” the Argentine concluded.