Girona’s wild and wonderful win over Atlético shows title tilt is no fluke

It was way after 11pm on a cold, misty Wednesday night in January, the first time fans had ventured out since Christmas, but they would have carried on until the morning if they could have. Once in a while a game comes along you wish would never end – once in a while or every other week if you’re Girona, purveyors of partidazos, serving up a 5-3, a 5-2, and three 4-2s – and this was it. A bit special, even for them.

In the final game of the first half of the season, week 19 in La Liga, Girona had laid into Atlético and then Atlético had laid back into them. There had been 33 shots, 20 on target, and six goals, the whole thing wonderfully wild. The only thing it didn’t have was a winner, and now there wasn’t going to be time for one.

Not a second wasted sadly meant not many seconds added – there’s a grim irony to it being the games when you would gladly gouge out your eyeballs that go on and on and the ones that are fun that finish first. If there was a kind of justice in it finishing 3-3, something shared, there was something missing too, the kind of ending the evening deserved.

Or so they thought. Instead, the game that got its first goal 101 seconds after the stadium clock started, got its last 40 seconds after the stadium clock stopped. Iván Martín, the midfielder considered underrated by his Girona teammates, went all Ronaldinho and everyone in the place went off their heads. “He doesn’t even know what he did,” teammate Aleix García said.

What he had done was escape one Atlético Madrid player and then, surrounded by three more of them just inside the area, nowhere left to go, no room to lift his foot let alone let fly, toe-poke the ball past Jan Oblak and into the top corner. It was, Diego Simeone said despite being defeated at the death, “a great winning goal for a great game”. As 4-3 winners, Girona had only gone and done it again, just even better this time.

Wednesday was that kind of night, a ridiculous game where both goalkeepers were brilliant but still let in seven between them. A night Álvaro Morata scored the first hat-trick of his La Liga career, could have scored two of them, claimed the Player of the Match award with 72% of the vote and still lost.

Because it was also the night when Artem Dovbyk, Girona’s top scorer, didn’t score and Cristhian Stuani, their second-top scorer, didn’t either. Instead, four of their teammates did. When Rodrigo De Paul, who made three goals, called Atlético’s performance “brutal” and Axel Witsel described it as “spectacular”, and when they were both right, but they were still beaten. And yet where you still couldn’t really say their opponents were lucky.

There is nothing lucky about Girona; risky, sure, but so much the better for it and deliberate too. For the first 20 minutes, Michel Sánchez’s side took Atlético apart the way they have so many others. Valery Fernández put them 1-0 up in the second minute with a gorgeous curled finish. Although Morata equalised on 14, Girona were as relentless as Atlético were accident-prone: 3-1 up in the 39th minute, with goals from Sávio and Daley Blind, it could have been more, the attempts on goal racking up like a Hot Shots body count.

With De Paul superb, Morata made it 3-2 with a neatly taken goal on 43.33 and then, he thought, 3-3 on 45.07. That one was ruled out for offside, but Morata did equalise on 53.11. It had been coming: it would be no exaggeration to say that was Atlético’s seventh chance in seven second-half minutes. Girona could not get out, Atlético smothering them, going man to man all round Montilivi.

“In my humble opinion, I think we were the better team in the second half,” said De Paul. “I always thought we would win, that we would get the fourth. You miss a chance and then a minute later you get another one, and another, and another, and another …”

Even Girona coach Míchel admitted: “In the second half you could see that Atlético were going to turn it around.”

They didn’t. As time slipped away and it looked like no one was going to win this, somehow Martín did. It’s hard to think of a more popular player – “you can con the people and the media but not your teammates, and the dressing room is totally won over by him,” Míchel said – and it’s not easy to think of a more significant moment either.

Sure, Antonio Rüdiger’s header against Mallorca a couple of hours earlier had ensured Real Madrid would be Spain’s winter champions, the trophy-less “title” handed to the team top of the table at the halfway stage when everyone has played everyone else, but Martín’s goal ensured that Girona remain level with them.

READ ALSO: Real Madrid maintain La Liga charge with tight win over Mallorca

It still doesn’t feel real somehow: Girona, joint top after 19 games, the psychological watershed. The team whose objective was survival have 48 points, one fewer than they got in the whole of last season. They’re on course for 96, are seven ahead of Barcelona, who needed a late penalty to defeat Las Palmas, and 10 above Atlético. They have never been in Europe, but they will be: they are 20 clear of the final European place.

“It’s a big cushion,” García said as Girona’s players celebrated in the dressing room, Blind standing on the bench behind him, mobile phone in hand – maybe the reception is better up there – while teammates leapt about and Yan Couto threw towels at him. “This is a historic night,” Míchel said.