Barcelona are through to the UEFA Champions League semi-finals with a 5-3 aggregate win, despite losing 3-1 at Borussia Dortmund on Tuesday with Serhou Guirassy hitting a hat-trick, while Paris Saint-Germain survived a second-half onslaught to beat Aston Villa 5-4 on aggregate and reach the semi-finals, despite a 3-2 defeat.
Holding a 4-0 lead after a dominant performance in Catalonia, Barcelona were made to sweat as Dortmund and Guirassy nearly pulled off a stunning turnaround. Guirassy put Dortmund in front with a Panenka from the spot with 11 minutes gone and headed them two goals clear early in the second half.
Dortmund sensed a sensation, but Barcelona hit back, with Fermin Lopez forcing Ramy Bensebaini into an own-goal with just more than half an hour remaining. Guirassy reignited Dortmund’s belief with a third on the 76th-minute mark and the final stages might have been different had Julian Brandt not been offside before scoring with 11 minutes remaining.
Photo: AFP
Despite losing their first competitive game this year, Barcelona are through to the semis, keeping their dream of a remarkable treble alive, 10 years after last completing the feat by winning the Champions League in Berlin.
Barcelona coach Hansi Flick praised Dortmund’s performance, adding that his side “need to focus on the positive, not the negatives.”
“What the team has shown in the past few weeks is incredible. We’ve got a lot ahead of us this season. We’re a step further, but we’re not even close to the end,” the German said.
Lopez said the experience would make the Catalans stronger.
“Dortmund have a really good team, you saw that today. Last week we made them suffer at our place. Today we suffered here, but in the end we were able to limit the damage,” the 21-year-old said. “We’re now in the semi-finals and can draw a lot of strength from this game today because it was a big task.”
Barcelona, considered title favorites, are to face either Inter or Bayern Munich in the final four.
In Birmingham, French champions Paris Saint-Germain were cruising toward the last four when fullbacks Achraf Hakimi and Nuno Mendes struck in the first 27 minutes to add to their 3-1 first-leg lead.
Youri Tielemans pulled a goal back for the English side before halftime and two goals in two minutes from John McGinn and Ezri Konsa transformed the tie early in the second period.
PSG were thankful to goalkeeper Gianluigi Donnarumma for keeping Unai Emery’s men at bay and preventing another famous collapse in the Champions League knockout stages.
“At the end, we got them suffering like we did,” Emery said. “To get this level is the next step forward that I want to try to build with Aston Villa.”
The match started on the wrong note, when the Europa League anthem blared out around Villa Park instead of the iconic Champions League song, leaving Aston Villa and PSG players looking quizzically at each other.
With Prince William watching on, Konsa made a facepalm gesture as he and Tielemans tried to contain their laughter, while PSG’s Fabian Ruiz and Ousmane Dembele exchanged puzzled glances.
Additional reporting by Reuters
When Paddy Dwyer arrived in China in 1976, crowds jostled to catch a glimpse of him and his companions — the first Western soccer team to play in the country. China was emerging from the chaos of the Cultural Revolution, and on the brink of market reforms that would take the country from economic stagnation to explosive growth. “All we could see was lines of people running beside our bus, trying to look in the windows, to see their first visual of a white person,” he said. “It was all bicycles,” he said. “There were very few cars to be seen.” Dwyer,
Some of Clearlake Capital Group’s largest investors are growing increasingly concerned about how much time the company’s co-founders are spending on sports investments as they have struggled to complete the fundraising for the private equity firm’s latest flagship fund. One of Clearlake’s co-founders, Behdad Eghbali, has been spending what some investors described as a disproportionate amount of time on the firm’s investment in Chelsea Football Club in recent months. Now, co-founder Jose E. Feliciano and his wife, Kwanza Jones, are nearing a record US$3.9 billion deal to acquire the San Diego Padres. That personal investment by Feliciano has set off the latest
A new NZ$683 million (US$404 million) stadium that was a symbol of Christchurch’s struggle to rebuild after a deadly earthquake struck the New Zealand city is to host its first match tomorrow in front of a sellout crowd. A magnitude 6.2 earthquake killed 185 people in February 2011 and toppled or damaged buildings, including the city’s old Lancaster Park. The stadium, which hosted international rugby and cricket, and was home to the Canterbury Crusaders, was badly damaged and never reopened. It was bulldozed in 2019 and turned into sports fields, leaving the Crusaders without a permanent home. Government funding for a new stadium was
The Philadelphia Flyers and the Pittsburg Penguins on Wednesday put a squeeze on the penalty box in Game 3 of their NHL playoff series — with 11 players cramped inside their designated punishment areas. Each could have snapped a team photo after a melee broke out in the second period of the Flyers’ 5-2 win over the Penguins in their Eastern Conference first-round series. “It was a party in there,” penalized Flyers defenseman Nick Seeler said. The celebration extended into the joyous locker room after the Flyers took a 3-0 series lead. Penguins forward Bryan Rust slammed Travis Konecny to the ice behind the
RSS