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Atletico's artistic warrior: How budding star Saul combines fight with flair

Sergio Perez / Reuters

When Saul Niguez looks out onto a football pitch, he sees a battleground rather than a canvas. Asked by Marca in October whether he considered himself one of the "artists" in Diego Simeone’s Atletico Madrid team, the midfielder could only shake his head.

"I think more of a warrior," he replied. "Because where your quality cannot take you, your cojones can - as [Carles] Puyol once said. That is how we all need to think: we need to know our limitations and know what we need to do on the pitch, since that is what allows us to grow."

But perhaps these roles are not mutually exclusive. In the week when Game of Thrones returned to our screens, we should all be cognizant that there is more than one way to win a fight. If Niguez’s warrior was transplanted to George R. R. Martin’s universe, it would be as a Braavosi water dancer, not an armour-plated Westeros knight.

Saul decided the first leg of Atletico Madrid’s Champions League semi-final against Bayern Munich with a single thrust. In the blink of an eye, and a swish of the left foot, he left three opponents for dead. David Alaba stood his ground nobly to the last, but could not prevent Saul from lancing his shot into the bottom corner of the net.

It was a spellbinding goal, the kind that needs to be watched half a dozen times before it can be properly understood. The balance, the footwork, the finish, even the little step-over at the end - every aspect was executed to perfection.

Bayern’s defenders could hardly have done any more to stop him, except perhaps to do a worse job of marking Juanfran, who Saul seemed to look for when he first received the ball in midfield. Only after concluding that the pass was not on did he decide to go it alone.

As special as this goal was, though, it might not have meant as much to Saul as the eventual result. He is a man who cares about winning above all else.

Related - 3 things we learned from Atletico's win over Bayern: Simeone does it again

When Marca asked during the aforementioned interview if he had been disappointed not to feature in the Madrid derby at the start of this campaign, Saul replied: "It is not the missed opportunity to play that annoys me, but the failure to pick up all three points. You have to think about the collective."

Some players might only pay lip service to that ideal. Saul is a man who puts his body where his mouth is. Only Filipe Luis has won more tackles for Atletico this season, and only five players from any team have covered more ground during matches in this season’s Champions League. All but one of those - his Atletico team-mate Koke - have played significantly more minutes.

Not even a goal as good as the one that Saul scored on Wednesday could persuade him to rest on his laurels. He was lined up on the right wing against Bayern, but remained as diligent in his defensive duties as he has been on his occasional appearances for Atletico at centre-back. When not taking the ball forwards himself, he was making sure that Douglas Costa did not get a chance to do the same.

This time last year, Saul was watching the Champions League semi-finals on TV. He had missed both legs of Atletico’s quarter-final defeat to Real Madrid after suffering kidney damage when Leverkusen’s Kyriakos Papadopoulos clattered into him during the previous round.

It was the lowest moment of his career to date, Saul so badly affected that he vomited seven times after leaving the pitch before he even made it down to Atletico’s changing room. He wound up having to sit out more than a month worth of games, just at the moment when he had been playing the best football of his young career.

To help himself move on from the experience, he got a new tattoo on his wrist with the message: "Strength does not come from physical capabilities but from the willpower in your soul." It is a fitting metaphor for this Atletico team, who always seem to fight that little bit harder than the rest.

Not by chance has Simeone’s team now kept 14 clean sheets in its last 16 Champions League home matches. By shutting down Bayern’s explosive attack, Atleti made sure that Saul’s goal would go down as more than just a beautiful footnote.

Atletico is a team packed full of footballing warriors. But nowhere is it written that they cannot be artists as well.

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