Atlético Madrid coach Diego Simeone was displeased with the fans’ behaviour, pushing him to the limit and lashing out at them.
The Madrid derby always invited a hostile crowd but this time it was objects thrown onto the pitch. This disrupted the game causing a temporary holt, resulting from racist chants that went off limit.
Sunday’s local rivalry had an unpleasant moment where fans behind the Metropolitano goal repeatedly threw objects like lighters and plastic bottles in the second half causing havoc.
Later after a 20-minute delay Éder Militão put visitors Real Madrid 1-0 up in the 64th minute, which was scrapped off by Ángel Correa helping 10 men Atlético grab a 1-1 result in La Liga with Marcos Llorente sent off.
Referee Mateo Busquets Ferrer’s decision to pause the game was not received well by the fans, whose outburst broke through the stadium’s loudspeakers. This made Coach Simeone and Captain Koke take immediate steps to speak with them and calm the crowd.
“The message was to think about the club, think about your team,” Simeone said later. “You aren’t helping the team. They said it wasn’t their fault, they said they’d been provoked by the opposition goalkeeper.”
Not the Atletico Madrid we wanted to see
Simeone suggests Real goalkeeper Thibaut Courtois could be partly responsible for the fans’ reactions, to his celebrations after Los Blancos broke the deadlock.
“We all have to help,” Simeone told DAZN. “Obviously the fans throwing lighters — like what happened at the Bernabeu, when Courtois was our player, and was hit on the head with a lighter — isn’t right. But we the protagonists don’t help when we provoke the fans and the fans get angry.
“Throwing things is wrong, it isn’t right, but we have to stay calm and understand the situation, know how we can celebrate a goal, not looking at the stands, with those gestures.”
As things started to heat up with more items landing on the field, the referee called the two teams off the pitch. As a result, an announcement was made that the game would be suspended for an initial 10 minutes, which extended to 15.
“The club will take the decisions they have to take with the fans who’ve committed these incidents,” Simeone said in the postmatch interview. “We don’t need those fans in the stands, we need the fans who support us and think about the team and the club.
“It doesn’t justify it, but we as protagonists can also help to make sure people don’t react like that. It doesn’t justify it, but be careful with what we do, myself included.”
Real Madrid coach Carlo Ancelotti appreciated the referee’s call to pause the game.
“I think it was the correct decision,” he said. “It was the right thing to do. Nobody likes to stop the game, everybody wanted to play, but I think the referee did well.”
Ancelotti also informed that Courtois had experienced a muscular injury near the end of the game and will undergo a test in the coming days.
Atletico also released a statement after the game: “From the moment that objects were thrown, the club’s security department has been working with the police to locate those involved and one of them has already been identified. These attitudes have no place in football and damage the image of a stadium that experienced a spectacular atmosphere with more than 70,000 fans in the stands, who have, in their great majority, shown exemplary behaviour.”
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