MADRID — Atletico Madrid has scored nine goals in its last three games to keep up its chase of La Liga leader Barcelona and will aim to take that goalscoring form into the second leg of its Champions League last 16 tie with PSV Eindhoven Tuesday.
PSV played for more than 20 minutes with 10 men in the first leg but held on for a goalless draw against Diego Simeone’s side, which romped to a 3-0 win over Deportivo La Coruna Saturday and is getting goals from everywhere.
“We’re scoring from different parts of the pitch, which shows we are creating more chances,” Simeone said.
Antoine Griezmann has scored in four league matches in a row and Atletico’s top marksman took his league tally to 16 against Deportivo
Simeone said that while Griezmann’s striker partner Luciano Vietto had not been among the scorers lately he was still making an important contribution.
“Vietto’s positioning is good even though he isn’t scoring, playing with his back to goal and laying the ball off or drawing defenders,” Simeone said.
“We also have people who come through from the second row like Saul and Koke,” he added of the midfielders.
“Our most important match of the season was Depor and from now the most important one is against PSV,” said Simeone, whose side is unbeaten in eight matches in all competitions and has conceded two goals during that run.
His PSV counterpart, Phillip Cocu, was less pleased with the Dutch leader’s performance in a 1-1 draw with Heerenveen at the weekend.
“We should have shown confidence on the ball and aggression and we should have played a high tempo game, but we didn’t. It was really a below-par first-half performance,” said Cocu.
PSV will be looking to avenge two group stage defeats by Atletico in the 2008-9 season in their only previous encounters in the competition.
Forward Luuk de Jong returns from suspension for PSV but Gaston Pereiro is suspended after being sent off in the first leg.
Atletico has Yannick Carrasco available after he missed the trip to Eindhoven with an ankle injury.
Man City looks for long-awaited
breakthrough against Kiev
Elsewhere, with all its vast wealth and boundless ambition, Manchester City is in the perfect position to at last start punching its weight in Europe this week by reaching the Champions League quarterfinals for the first time.
Holding a 3-1 lead from the first leg of their round-of-16 tie against Dynamo Kiev, it should make the long-awaited breakthrough into the elite last-eight comfortably enough Wednesday against a team that has never won a competitive game in England.
The only problem is that this is Manchester City we are talking about, a team that has dealt in maddening inconsistency for much of the season.
So the Etihad Stadium faithful, who have had to watch it bow out to Barcelona at this stage in the last two seasons, will take nothing for granted, especially after seeing its Premier League title hopes fade so tamely at the weekend.
A big team, yes, but one with a seeming inferiority complex whenever it comes to playing top-flight opposition in England. Extraordinarily, the Ukrainian club’s record in European competition on English soil reads played 13, drawn 2, lost 11.
It is a sequence that does not bode well for its manager Sergei Rebrov who, having made his own mark in the English game as a striker at Tottenham Hotspur and West Ham United, now has the job of making his players believe. — Agencies
