Valencia CF showed signs of life last week after managing to beat Villarreal CF and end a terrible streak of 7 matches without a win. Now the team has to continue in a winning manner in order for that result to matter, otherwise we are just back to square one, but unfortunately for Valencia CF it just so happens that their next opponent is Atletico Madrid who have been solid this year and are sitting at 4th position on the table with 22 points. As always Atletico Madrid are a rugged, tough team and are playing physical and aggressive football, focusing on mostly defending and then on occasions hitting the opponents with fast attacks, which is similar to how Valencia CF has played this season, so it would be interesting to see which team has more control of the ball and takes the initiative.
I think Valencia CF can actually get a decent result against Atletico Madrid as long as we fix our leaky defense, because if you look at the statistics we do seem to score reasonable amount of goals, even if we aren't creating a ton of chances and missing some very good ones, statistically speaking we should be getting better results, if not for the terrible defending. Its mostly been individual errors, players just not following their mark close enough and allowing too much space for them to do whatever, so defenders need to be more aggressive, but not overly as to give away needless penalties.
Good news for Valencia CF is that players like Correia, Cheryshev, Racic will be available for this match, though all of them are likely to start from the bench as a precaution, though Carlos Soler is going to be starting the match. Jose Bordalas is likely to reinforce the midfield, similar to the last match as to avoid conceding goals and look for goals on counter attacks, but also beat Atletico's midfield as well and negate them of the ability to start dangerous attacks.
Valencia CF Squad: Cillessen, Correia, Diakhaby, Alderete, Gaya; Helder Costa, Hugo, Soler, Wass, Andre; Guedes
Winning Probability: Valencia CF 25% Draw 50% Atletico Madrid 25%
Result Prediction: Both teams play similar football, though Atletico much more effectively of course and they've been perfecting their play style for close to a decade now, so Atletico Madrid are the slight favorites, but not by much since they also tend to struggle to score goals and their wins are marginal with just one goal difference, usually something like 1-0. So Valencia CF has a good chance to get a positive result, but its going to be very hard of course, so I'm thinking this is most likely going to be a draw. Win would be amazing, it would propel Valencia CF really hard and could potentially put us back in the European competition fight, but a draw would be a decent result as well against a very dangerous and solid opponent!