Barca win thriller to book place in Champions League quarterfinals
FC Barcelona won a thrilling Champions League tie 3-1 at home to Napoli to assure their place in the quarterfinals of the Champions League.
Cristiano Ronaldo and Gonzalo Higuain stole the show on Wednesday night as Juventus thrashed a well-organised Bayer Leverkusen at the BayArena.
The first saw both the teams sharing a goalless scoreline as the players failed to convert the half chances. However, the second half witnessed a dominating Juventus that made a clinical 2-0 finish before heading towards the knockout stages of Champions League.
Ronaldo would have had opened the scoring in the 51st minute when he found the back of the net. He got onto the end of Federico Bernardeschi’s ball and shot an angled drive that rebounded off the far post and into the back of the net, but the goal didn’t stand as the flag was raised. After this, the tempo of the game dropped a bit and Maurizio Sarri replaced Bernardeschi by Paulo Dybala.
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Dybala made an immediate impact by assisting Ronaldo for the first blood of the game in the 75th minute. Dybala received the ball on the edge of the box, and he fed it across to Ronaldo, who directed the ball across the line from close range to beat Bayer goalie Lukas Hradecky.
Soon, the Bundesliga team started looking for an equaliser, but a late goal from Higuain killed the match.
Dybala got onto the end of a looping ball before passing it to Higuain, who smacked it into the bottom corner of the net and locked things in favour of Juve.
Bianconeri, who had already qualified for the round of 16, will find out who their Last 16 opponents will be on Monday.
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