Sampaoli rues Atlético's draw with Santos in a game of two halves

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·14 September 2025

Sampaoli rues Atlético's draw with Santos in a game of two halves

Atlético left the field this Sunday with a bitter taste. Playing at the MRV Arena, the black and white team only managed to draw 1 x 1 with Santos, in a match marked by the contrast of a first half below expectations and a final stage of greater dominance.

After the final whistle, coach Jorge Sampaoli analyzed the team's performance and did not hide his frustration with the result.According to the coach, Galo struggled in the initial 45 minutes:

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“I think they were better in the first half. We didn't find superiority to play. We corrected at halftime and the team played much better. Santos tied the game in a sporadic move, when there were no chances for them to tie the game. Sad about that, in the second half the team acted differently, in a dominant way, playing in the opponent's field, had more possession of the ball”.

Even with the improvement, Sampaoli highlighted that Atlético erred in decisive offensive actions: “We had difficulty in making the individual imbalance, to create clearer chances. Today we should have won the game for our second half, when we had one more man. But we have to seek solutions so that collectively we can improve the attacks and individually allow our players to create more goal chances”, he said.

The coach also drew attention to the need to recover the confidence and aggressiveness of the group: “What worries me most now is to improve our structure and recover the ability of some players to unbalance more. Otherwise, it will be very complicated. We need to regain confidence, regain aggressiveness.”

Sampaoli admitted that he did not like the team's posture at the beginning of the match, but recognized evolution after the interval.

“In the first half today, I didn't feel very represented. In the second no, we changed and tried in another way and as I said before, the team should have won the game. But there are still many other situations in our game, we have to keep working, we just arrived. We need players who have a lot of ambition to generate attacks. Without ambition it will be very difficult.”

Finally, the Argentine explained the changes made to try to improve offensive construction: “The changes we promoted for the second half, with Franco and Alexsander, we had a better exit (of the ball) and the team reached the opponent's field more easily. With Igor Gomes falling on the left side, Arana had more possibility to pass with speed there.”

Galo now “turns the key” focuses on the South American Cup. The Minas Gerais team faces Bolívar (BOL), at the altitude of La Paz, on Wednesday (17), at 7:00 pm, for the continental competition.

This article was translated into English by Artificial Intelligence. You can read the original version in 🇧🇷 here.