Barcelona and Atletico Madrid meet at the Camp Nou on Saturday night for a game which is effectively a title decider, with the home side hoping to stretch their advantage at the top of the table to a surely insurmountable 11 points with just seven games remaining.
For Barca, there is also the backdrop of the rapidly approaching Champions League quarter-final showdown with Manchester United, but Ernesto Valverde’s men will have to put that out of their minds as they focus on securing another piece of domestic silverware.
Atletico, meanwhile, know it is win or bust if they want to retain any chance of fighting for the title, and the question of how Diego Simeone will approach the game tactically is the first of our key talking points ahead of the action.
CAN ATLETICO GO FOR BROKE?
Going flat out for victory away from home against a high-powered team like Barcelona is the last thing that comes naturally to Simeone’s Atletico, who are far more suited to sitting back, keeping the game tight and attempting to strike on the counter-attack or through a set-piece.
The recent history of this fixture has been a succession of cautious affairs, with the 1-1 draw at the Wanda Metropolitano in November perfectly illustrative of a trend which has seen just five goals scored in the last three meetings between the teams.
Atletico haven’t succeeded in netting more than once against Barca since the 2016 Champions League quarter-final, and they have never done so at the Camp Nou in 11 attempts under Simeone. The chances, therefore, of the Argentine coach suddenly instructing his players to employ the open and attack-minded approach executed so successfully by Villarreal in their 4-4 draw against Barca in midweek are vanishingly thin.
Simeone would instinctively prefer to keep the game goalless and hope that Atletico will somehow sneak a goal rather than engaging in a shoot-out, but his team will surely have to show a significant amount of attacking intent in pursuit of the victory they need to keep the title race open. The extent to which they are prepared to take risks will be the determining factor in the shape of the game.
MORE MESSI MAGIC
Last season’s corresponding fixture came in an extremely similar scenario, with a 1-0 victory for Barca in March 2018 opening up an eight-point advantage for the Catalan club which eventually proved decisive in the title race.
The only goal of that encounter came from an extremely predictable source: a free-kick from Lionel Messi, who brilliantly beat the despairing dive of Jan Oblak with a thunderous 25-yard missile into the top right corner, registering his 600th career goal and marking the third consecutive game in which he had scored with a set-piece.
Fast forward 13 months, and Messi is at it again: Tuesday night’s draw at Villarreal featured Messi rifling home another unstoppable free-kick, meaning that he has – once again – scored from a set-piece in three consecutive Barca games after also netting with dead ball strikes against Real Betis and Espanyol either side of the international break.
Only a fool would bet against Messi producing more match-winning magic to sink Atletico and taking a step closer to his first league title as club captain, and the sensational form produced by the Argentine throughout the campaign – which has seen him score 42 goals in 39 games – is providing a tantalising promise that he is building up towards a very special conclusion to the season.
PIQUE AND GRIEZMANN REUNITED
Even Messi cannot do everything on his own, however, and perhaps his team’s second-best player over the course of the season has been Gerard Pique, whose importance in the centre of defence was strikingly apparent by his absence during the madness of Tuesday’s game at Villarreal.
A rested Pique will be back to marshal his team’s efforts this weekend, and his chief task will be to shackle Atletico’s star striker, Antoine Griezmann, with whom he formed a strange kind of business partnership last summer: the defender’s film company produced an infamous video documenting the Frenchman’s decision to reject a move to Barca in preference for staying at Atletico.
Pique’s involvement in that episode understandably infuriated Barca’s hierarchy, who were incensed that a senior player could allow himself to get tangled up in the club’s failed attempt to make a high-profile signing. But they will be counting on him on Saturday night to provide a sense of order to a defence which looked chaotic in his absence, and if Pique can perform to the levels he has reached in recent weeks it will give his team a solid platform to claim a crucial victory.
