Athletic Bilbao on Monday ended a 31-year trophy drought with a 1-1 draw at Barcelona, claiming the Spanish Supercopa with a 5-1 aggregate victory over the reigning European champions.
After Bilbao’s stunning 4-0 win in Friday’s first leg, Barcelona threatened a comeback when Lionel Messi put the hosts ahead a minute before halftime. However, their hopes of an improbable turnaround diminished when Gerard Pique earned a rash red card for screaming in the face of a line judge in the 56th.
That helped Bilbao withstand the onslaught before Aritz Aduriz netted the equalizer in the 74th minute, adding to the striker’s hat-trick on Friday.
Photo: AP
Bilbao also finished with 10 men after Kike Sola was sent off in the 86th minute for a challenge on Javier Mascherano.
Bilbao won their last title in 1984, when they beat Barcelona 1-0 in the Copa del Rey final to complete a double of cup and league trophies. The Supercopa traditionally pits last season’s league winners against the cup champion — but since Barcelona won both, Bilbao played courtesy of its runner-up finish in the Copa del Rey.
“We have been waiting for this for a long time,” Bilbao coach Ernesto Valverde said.
Photo: AP
“Generations of players have passed through Athletic since those league and cup titles of the 1980s. We knew it would arrive eventually,” he added.
The result means Barcelona cannot match the six titles they won in a single calendar year under Pep Guardiola in 2009. Last week, Barcelona won the UEFA Supercopa after completing a rare treble of the Champions League, Spanish League and Copa del Rey last season, and are to play in the Club World Cup in December.
Luis Enrique’s Barcelona will not have to wait long to try and avenge the defeat. His side travel back to Bilbao to start their defense of the Spanish league title on Sunday.
After losing to Barcelona’s collection of international stars in three Copa del Rey finals since 2009, the win is quite an achievement for a club that only fields homegrown players from the northern Basque Country or neighboring territories.
Bilbao savored the moment with the smattering of fans wearing their red-and-white shirts after the final whistle.
“This makes up for those finals we lost to Barca,” Valverde said. “It isn’t a league or a cup, but this has an enormous value for us. There will be no better place than Bilbao for a party tonight.”
With their pride stung and nothing to lose, Barcelona showed the verve they lacked from the first leg right from the start. However, missed opportunities and bad tempers soon quashed any slim hopes of a comeback.
“I saw a very good Bilbao side, and we were seeing a very good final until Gerard was sent off,” Luis Enrique said.
Pedro Rodriguez had Barcelona’s first chance when he blasted the ball high from close range. Moments later, Pique began his frequent incursions into attack and smashed the ball off the bar in the sixth minute.
The Camp Nou crowd finally erupted when Messi broke through just before the break after Luis Suarez chested Ivan Rakitic’s cross down for the forward to poke past goalie Gorka Iraizoz.
However, instead of unsettling Bilbao, it was Barcelona that came undone. The team paid dearly for Pique’s outburst at the line judge for what the Spain defender thought was an offside situation that was not flagged.
Aduriz sealed the result against the undermanned back line when he was left unmarked and with enough time to put his own rebound.
Revelations of positive doping tests for nearly two dozen Chinese swimmers that went unpunished sparked an intense flurry of accusations and legal threats between the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) and the head of the US drug-fighting organization, who has long been one of WADA’s fiercest critics. WADA on Saturday said it was turning to legal counsel to address a statement released by US Anti-Doping Agency (USADA) CEO Travis Tygart, who said WADA and anti-doping authorities in China swept positive tests “under the carpet by failing to fairly and evenly follow the global rules that apply to everyone else in the world.” The
Taiwanese judoka Yang Yung-wei on Saturday won silver in the men’s under-60kg category at the Asian Judo Championships in Hong Kong. Nicknamed the “judo heartthrob” in Taiwan, the Olympic silver-medalist missed out on his first Asian Championships gold when he lost to Japanese judoka Taiki Nakamura in the finals. Yang defeated three opponents on Saturday to reach the final after receiving a bye through the round of 32. He first topped Laotian Soukphaxay Sithisane in the round of 16 with two seoi nage (over-the-shoulder throws), then ousted Indian Vijay Kumar Yadav in the quarter-finals with his signature ude hishigi sankaku gatame (triangular armlock). He
RALLY: It was only the second time the Taiwanese has partnered with Kudermetova, and the match seemed tight until they won seven points in a row to take the last set 10-2 Taiwan’s Chan Hao-ching and Russia’s Veronika Kudermetova on Sunday won the Porsche Tennis Grand Prix women’s doubles final in Stuttgart, Germany. The pair defeated Norway’s Ulrikke Eikeri and Estonia’s Ingrid Neel 4-6, 6-3, 10-2 in a tightly contested match at the WTA 500 tournament. Chan and Kudermetova fell 4-6 in the first set after having their serve broken three times, although they played increasingly well. They fought back in the second set and managed to break their opponents’ serve in the eighth game to triumph 6-3. In the tiebreaker, Chan and Kudermetova took a 3-0 lead before their opponents clawed back two points, but
Taiwanese gymnast Lee Chih-kai failed to secure an Olympic berth in the pommel horse following a second-place finish at the last qualifier in Doha on Friday, a performance that Lee and his coach called “unconvincing.” The Tokyo Olympics silver medalist finished runner-up in the final after scoring 6.6 for degree of difficulty and 8.800 for execution for a combined score of 15.400. That was just 0.100 short of Jordan’s Ahmad Abu Al Soud, who had qualified for the event in Paris before the Apparatus World Cup series in Qatar’s capital. After missing the final rounds in the first two of four qualifier