Atletico Madrid coach Diego Simeone on Sunday said the brilliance of Lionel Messi was the only real difference between his side and Barcelona after the irrepressible Argentine’s sublime free-kick goal decided their top-of-the-table La Liga showdown.
Mess’s stinging set-piece strike in the 26th minute gave Barca a 1-0 win in a tight game of few chances, lifting the Catalans eight points ahead of Atletico at the top with 11 games remaining.
“If we took the Barcelona shirt off Messi and gave him an Atletico one, I’m sure we’d have won 1-0,” Simeone told a news conference. “He plays like he is playing on the streets.”
Photo: AFP
Barcelona manager Ernesto Valverde also paid tribute to Messi, who scored his 600th career goal and netted a free-kick for the third consecutive game.
“There’s no one like him in the world. I don’t know what would have happened if he played for Atletico, I don’t want to even imagine it,” Valverde said.
“When you are on the other side you always think Messi is going to score, your sense of fear is far stronger when he is your rival. When he is on your side, you are always hopeful,” added Valverde, who suffered repeatedly against Messi while in charge of Athletic Bilbao.
Atletico could have reduced the gap behind Barca to two points with victory at the Camp Nou, yet they did not manage a single shot on target throughout the 90 minutes and were particularly unimaginative in the first half.
They improved after the break when Simeone threw on forwards Kevin Gameiro and Angel Correa, but the coach denied his tactics were to blame for the defeat.
“The game is 90 minutes and there’s always stages when you don’t play well. There were very few chances in the game and while we didn’t attack in the first half, in the second we were closer to being the team we truly are,” Simeone said.
The Argentine admitted it was difficult to imagine Barcelona throwing away their eight-point lead at the top and Valverde said it was a significant win for his side.
“It was a very important game because being eight points ahead is not the same as two,” Valverde said. “It’s obviously not definitive, but we have taken a step toward it. We’ll see what the future holds.”
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