Diego Simeone clatters into a rival; the rival retaliates; things turn ugly. It’s a familiar enough sequence of events, except this time David Beckham is nowhere to be seen.
The disagreeable little incident happened this week at the training ground of Atletico Madrid. It involved Simeone and an Atletico teammate not pleased to have been fouled in a practice game. Other Atletico players had to rush in to separate them.
Things are not going too well for England’s least favourite Argentine football player, the man whose histrionics got Beckham sent off in that infamous World Cup game in 1998. The spat with his teammate is sympto- matic of his own poor form and of the prevailing tension at Atletico, who attached high hopes to the signing of Simeone, but have got off to an average start in the Spanish season, lying in mid-table with 14 points from 10 games.
The funny thing is that if you had been asked to place a bet on which of the two big Madrid clubs’ recent signings would succeed more quickly in La Liga, the wise money would have gone not on Beckham, but on the man who caused him enduring grief that night in St-Etienne five years ago.
Simeone is no dandy and no one has ever accused him of being a sweet striker of a football, but he was welcomed at Atletico as a redeemer. He had played at the less fashionable, but more passionately supported of the Madrid giants between 1994 and 1997, winning a cup and a league title. After six years in Italy, at Inter and Lazio, he returned as the revered warrior who — the fans badly wanted to believe — would restore grit and glory to a team who had, in his absence, grown mediocre and weak-willed.
If you had asked your average Real fan in July what he or she thought of Beckham’s signing they would have snorted something along the lines of: ‘What? The bloke with the hairdos who wears his wife’s knickers? He might sell a shirt or two in Japan, but he’s not fit to play on the same pitch as our galacticos.â€
Further evidence of just how far out of the park the England captain has kicked those perceptions was provided by the response of the Spanish press to the news that he had severed ties with SFX, the sports marketing firm that turned his fame into gold. El Rey David — King David — had again shown, the press raved, that he loved Real Madrid more than money itself.
Simeone has suffered one indignity after another after declaring during pre-season that returning to Atletico was ‘like coming back to lifeâ€.
The first and most brutal indignity came just two games into the season, when after a players’ revolt he was stripped of the team captaincy. The honour went, by dressing-room acclaim, to 19-year-old Fernando Torres, a striker reckoned to be an exciting prospect in Spain, but barely out of his nappies, in football terms, compared to the battle-hardened Argentine.
It got worse after Atletico lost their next game 3-0 to Valencia. The returning hero was dropped. And not just for any old game. It was at home against Barcelona — a big fixture in Spain from which Atletico emerged with some celebrated triumphs in the glory days of the mid-1990s. Encouraged by a 0-0 draw against the Catalans, the (also increasingly hapless) manager Gregorio Manzano kept Simeone on the bench for the following weekend’s visit to Deportivo, who thrashed them 5-1.
Now it’s all hands at the pump and Simeone, it appears, may no longer play in the position that built his reputation as a wilier Argentine version of Roy Keane. Considered to be past his sell-by date as a defensive midfielder, the word is that he will be asked to try his luck at centre-back.
So, is that the end of the story? Can we gloat in the knowledge that justice has finally been done?
Has virtue, in the shape of the angelic Beckham, triumphed and has evil — Mephistopheles Simeone — met its just desserts? For today, maybe. But in football, triumph and disaster tend to be short-lived. The only certainty is surprise, starting, in this case, with an outcome that would have been considered utterly inconceivable in St-Etienne five years ago: that the protagonists of that epic game’s most memorable clash should end up as cross-town rivals in Madrid.
In the same way that the start of the season has seen expectations for both players roundly contradicted, so they may be contradicted once again come the season’s end. Right now Beckham is the king of the Bernabeu; because he gets stuck in, because he has made more passes for goal than any other Real player, because he has even scored a couple himself. His challenge now, with expectations suddenly much higher than they were two months ago, is to sustain it.
The one encouraging reflection Simeone might be making these days is that things cannot get a lot worse. A consummate professional (the one thing he may have in common with Beckham), Simeone has uttered not one cheep of complaint about losing the captaincy, being dropped or being switched to centre-half — a position where, you never know, he could flower and finds his football life gloriously extended by two or three years. If attitude were all, success for Simeone would be guaranteed.
‘I won’t say I am a good or a bad player,†he said in a recent interview, ‘I’ll just say that I always give everything I’ve got.†Asked about the vicissitudes of the footballer’s life, he replied: ‘Everything in life strengthens you and makes you grow.â€
Precisely the philosophy that has defined Beckham’s response to the hell that Simeone condemned him to in 1998. —