Two late goals for Olympique de Marseille kept their hopes of a UEFA Champions League spot next season alive with a 2-1 comeback win over AS Monaco in Sunday’s late Ligue 1 match.
It took the Principality side just one minute to take the lead after Joao Moutinho pounced on a defensive mistake, but Marseille hit back with 10 minutes to go as Andre Ayew headed home his ninth goal of the season, before Romain Alessandrini secured the three points with just three minutes to play.
Since coming back from the international break at the start of last month, one-time leaders Marseille’s title hopes have evaporated and their Champions League aspirations had nearly followed suit ahead of their first home win since January.
Photo: AFP
The win sends Marseille back into fourth place, just two points behind their opponents.
“As long as Champions League qualification is still mathematically possible, we’ll have faith and hope,” Marseille coach Marcelo Bielsa said.
“Our aim was to win this match, but I’ve seen the table and we’re third. Now we just have to take the points required to keep that place,” Monaco caoch Leonardo Jardim said. “I feel we had a very good first half, we had four good chances to score more than one goal. Had we been more efficient, we’d have scored a second. We could have won that game.”
Monaco had opted for a defensive formation, with former Chelsea defender Ricardo Carvalho moving up into the midfield alongside Geoffrey Kondogbia to replace captain Jeremy Toulalan, who was just back from injury and started on the bench.
Bielsa wanted his Marseille side to bombard the visitors early on and gave Romain Alessandrini the nod ahead of struggling Florian Thauvin, while defender Rod Fanni was also benched.
However, Monaco were the ones on the front foot from the off, with Portugal midfielder Moutinho scoring after just 50 seconds.
The perfect start stunned Marseille as it took them 25 minutes to react through an Alessandrini strike, slightly deflected by Aymen Abdennour, that did not worry goalkeeper Danijel Subasic.
Monaco gained confidence and Fabinho tested Steve Mandanda from a distance, before Bernardo Silva hit the post following a Yannick Ferreira-Carrasco run inside the penalty area just before halftime.
However, the second half changed everything as Marseille fought back, with Dimitri Payet and Thauvin piling on the pressure, but it was Ayew who leveled with a powerful header following a good run by Payet on the left, before the France international delivered his 15th assist of the season for Alessandrini.
It was Monaco’s first league loss since a 1-0 defeat at En Avant de Guingamp in early February.
Earlier, AS Saint-Etienne moved closer to the Champions League places with a 5-0 drubbing of OGC Nice.
Goals from Loic Perrin, Jeremy Clement, Mevlut Erding, Max-Alain Gradel and Kevin Monnet-Paquet allowed Saint-Etienne to remain with Marseille on 63 points, behind on goal-difference.
Montpellier Herault, the 2011-2012 champions, also kept their UEFA Europa League chances alive with a last-gap 1-0 win at Racing Club de Lens.
Montpellier remain seventh with two games left, but are only three points adrift of Girondins de Bordeaux in sixth, which will be good enough to qualify for next season’s Europa League as long as Paris Saint-Germain beat second-tier AJ Auxerre in the Coupe de France final later this month.
Bayer 04 Leverkusen go into today’s match at TSG 1899 Hoffenheim stung from their first league defeat in 16 months. Leverkusen were beaten 3-2 at home by RB Leipzig before the international break, the first loss since May last year for the reigning league and cup champions. While any defeat, particularly against a likely title rival, would have disappointed coach Xabi Alonso, the way in which it happened would be most concerning. Just as they did in the Supercup against VfB Stuttgart and in the league opener to Borussia Moenchengladbach, Leverkusen scored first, but were pegged back. However, while Leverkusen rallied late to
If all goes well when the biggest marathon field ever gathered in Australia races 42km through the streets of Sydney on Sunday, World Marathon Majors (WMM) will soon add a seventh race to the elite series. The Sydney Marathon is to become the first race since Tokyo in 2013 to join long-established majors in New York, London, Boston, Berlin and Chicago if it passes the WMM assessment criteria for the second straight year. “We’re really excited for Sunday to arrive,” race director Wayne Larden told a news conference in Sydney yesterday. “We’re prepared, we’re ready. All of our plans look good on
The lights dimmed and the crowd hushed as Karoline Kristensen entered for her performance. However, this was no ordinary Dutch theater: The temperature was 80°C and the audience naked apart from a towel. Dressed in a swimsuit and to the tune of emotional music, the 21-year-old Kristensen started her routine, performed inside a large sauna, with a bed of hot rocks in the middle. For a week this month, a group of wellness practitioners, called “sauna masters,” are gathering at a picturesque health resort in the Netherlands to compete in this year’s Aufguss world sauna championships. The practice takes its name from a
When details from a scientific experiment that could have helped clear Russian figure skater Kamila Valieva landed at the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA), the leader of the organization’s reaction was unequivocal: “We have to stop that urgently,” he wrote. No mention of the test ever became public and Valieva’s defense at the Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS) went on without it. What effect the information could have had on Valieva’s case is unclear, but without it, the skater, then 15 years old, was eventually disqualified from the 2022 Winter Olympics after testing positive for a banned heart medication that would later