Suarez and Messi celebrate Barcelona’s first goal. (Reuters)
Barcelona has won a game of soccer.
This tends to be an all-too-common occurrence. But it
took the Catalans three attempts to register their first victory of
2017. Last Thursday, they lost the first leg of their Copa del Rey round of 16 tie with Athletic Bilbao 2-1 in a nutty game, in spite of their hosts going down to nine men.
On Sunday, it took a magical 90th-minute Lionel Messi
free kick just to salvage a 1-1 draw at Villarreal in La Liga in
another uncharacteristically disjointed performance. The Yellow
Submarine perhaps deserved more.
On Wednesday, Barca finally ended the brief slump by
beating Athletic 3-1 at home in the return leg to see Luis Enrique’s
team through to the quarterfinals. But a superb Messi free kick was once
again required to settle the thing, after Athletic had gotten an
aggregate equalizer early in the second half that foretold extra time if
the score stayed the same. That was Messi’s third free kick goal in
three games, as Barca’s lone score in the first leg came from one of his
set pieces as well.
Like in the first leg, Barcelona was predictably
dominant. And players who have struggled for form lately – like Andres
Iniesta, Sergio Busquets, Neymar and Luis Suarez – were a good deal
sharper. Athletic, without the important Ander Iturraspe and Raul
Garcia, both suspended from their first leg sending-offs, nevertheless
mounted another valiant defense.
But in the 26th minute, Suarez was wrongly denied a
goal. Neymar was called offside when he was played through Athletic’s
back line, even though he wasn’t. His square ball had given his
Uruguayan colleague a wide-open tap-in.
Not 10 minutes later, Messi found Neymar on the left,
and the Brazilian lofted a deep cross at Suarez. He backtracked to
properly line up for the ball and then unleashed a splendid scissor kick
to put Barca ahead. It was his 100th goal for the club.
No comments:
Post a Comment