The match went very surprising for most people without doubt. It was like most of the world were waiting for Leverkusen to win.
I guess nobody expected them to play this poorly - including me.
I didn't like Xabi Alonso's tactical preferences in this match. It didn't fit a coach like him who had a 51-match unbeaten series. Gasperini looked well-prepared against their tough opponent though. His players performed fearlessly.
By the way while it was 2-0 I still couldn't be sure of Atalanta. You know the Roma comeback. But Lookman's completing a hat-trick by a great goal sealed the deal! Completely deserved win and a marvelous effort by Lookman.
there are several differences and some of Xabi tactics that made me very emotional.
first point is that the Leverkusen players did not have the opportunity to attack because the Atalanta players continued to apply pressure by chasing every ball towards the Leverkusen players and blocking the opportunity to pass it to other players.
I mean, if you look back at the Leverkusen players, their playing style is always easily guessed by the Atalanta players and you will definitely also see how Atalanta playing style is like continuing to press the Leverkusen players until the mentality of the Leverkusen players becomes a little less confident, always less ready to control the ball and too often lost the ball.
and on the one hand, Leverkusen mistake is that they always have difficulty getting opportunities to score, but when they have the opportunity to score, everything is in vain, like the opportunity that Alex Grimaldo got, it was very clear that he could score, but he couldn't control the ball to score.
Leverkusen next mistake was when a teammate got the ball, the other players just waited for the ball and didn't try to find free space to launch an attack and this was often easy for Atalanta to guess and ended up Leverkusen continuing to get a deadly attack that could score 3.
In conclusion, in yesterday's match, Atalanta was much more prepared and confident to face this match and Leverkusen had a big mistake in players who were not able to look for opportunities at every opportunity.