UEFA Champions League
SPURS ARE LIKE ‘A GUN WITHOUT BULLETS’, LAMENTS MOURINHO
Jose Mourinho has refused to write off Tottenham’s hopes of reaching the Champions League quarter-finals after their 1-0 home defeat by RB Leipzig on Wednesday night, insisting that his team’s spirit will give them a chance of overcoming their selection crisis in attack.
Spurs could be without Son Heung-min and Harry Kane for the rest of the season, leaving them desperately short of options, and they played without any strikers against the Bundesliga outfit.
The visitors dominated the first leg of their last-16 tie from start to finish. But with only a second-half penalty from Timo Werner separating both sides, Mourinho feels his team can mount a comeback when they visit Leipzig for the reverse fixture on March 10.
“1-0 is 1-0,” the Spurs manager said. “It is not 10-0. The result is open. It is as simple as that.
“We wouldn’t be the first team to lose 1-0 at home and to win the tie away. Why shouldn’t we do it?”
While the Portuguese was forced to use Lucas Moura as a makeshift striker and had to throw on a barely fit Erik Lamela, his only attacking player on the bench, he praised his players for coping manfully.
Highlighting his team’s paucity in attack, he said: “This is our situation, it’s like going to a fight with a gun without bullets.
“Lamela, do you know how many training sessions he had with the team? Zero. Direct from injury to 20 minutes of a game in the Champions League.
“Lucas and (Steven) Bergwijn, what you saw in the end were two very tired players.
“The thing that keeps me confident is the spirit, the mentality of my players. We are in a very difficult situation so I am so, so proud of the players. What worries me is this is going to be the situation until the end of the season.
The next match against Leipzig, the one thing I can guarantee is that, even if I don’t know who playing in attack, we are going there to fight.”
Mourinho also sought to play down Dele Alli angrily throwing a water bottle and one of his boots to the turf after being taken off midway through the second half.
“He was angry with his performance, not with me,” he said.
“I took him off and the team improved.”
With Kane and Son out for the second leg, Leipzig will be favourites to reach the quarter-finals for the first time in what is only their second foray into the competition.
However, coach Julian Nagelsmann believes Spurs, even if weakened, are not a team to be taken lightly. He was also slightly disappointed not to have taken a bigger lead to Germany as “we could have won by more”.
Werner, who now has 26 goals in all competitions this term, agreed with his boss, saying: “There’s still a lot to do in Leipzig.
“Tottenham is a good team, they showed last year (by reaching the final) that mentally, they can come back and we have to do the same like today.”
In Milan, debutants Atalanta hammered Valencia 4-1 in the first leg to take a giant step towards the last eight of the competition.
THE GUARDIAN
Spain’s LaLiga will be represented by at least five teams in the Champions League next season after Italy’s Lazio were eliminated from the Europa League on Thursday while Athletic Bilbao progressed to the semi-finals.
LaLiga earned the second of two European Performance Spots handed out by UEFA, which go to associations “with the best collective performance by their clubs” in UEFA competitions.
England’s Premier League was the first to secure an extra berth in Europe’s top competition, on top of the four granted to the top four teams in the domestic table.
Villarreal are fifth in the LaLiga standings, with 51 points from 30 matches.
They are three points ahead of sixth-placed Real Betis and eight in front of Celta Vigo and Mallorca, with all three clubs having played one more game than Villarreal.
-Reuters
Real Madrid’s record-breaking manager Carlo Ancelotti had no complaints after his side’s Champions League reign was ended in emphatic fashion by Arsenal in the quarter-finals on Wednesday.
Italian Ancelotti won a record-extending fifth Champions League trophy last season as Real beat Borussia Dortmund at Wembley, but his side went down 2-1 at home to Arsenal for a crushing 5-1 aggregate defeat.
“There are two sides to football, the happy part that has happened to us many times and the sad part we have to handle in the same way. It has happened to us fewer times than to other teams, but we have to manage it because it allows us to be better in the next games.”
When Real keeper Thibaut Courtois saved Bukayo Saka’s early penalty and minutes later Real were awarded a spot kick for a push by Declan Rice on Kylian Mbappe, it seemed that the great escape might still be a possibility.
But Real’s penalty was overturned after a lengthy VAR check, and in truth, they never looked remotely threatening as their bid for a 16th European Cup crown ended in feeble fashion.
“To change the dynamic, we needed something positive, like the penalty he whistled and then took off. We needed something to have more confidence, but we were not able to change the dynamic of the first leg,” Ancelotti said.
Despite the defeat, Ancelotti said Real’s season still has plenty of possibilities, not least trying to bridge a four-point gap to La Liga leaders Barcelona.
“Now we are in the fight for La Liga. We have a disadvantage, but we have the Barcelona game, we have the Copa del Rey final, the Club World Cup, and we have to manage this part, which is another part of football that we are not used to,” he said.
“It’s time to hold our heads high and learn from our mistakes. It’s sad today, but I have absolutely no worries about how my players will respond. We’ll fight on, we’ll learn from the experience, and we’ll try to be better for the next match.”
-Reuters
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Arsenal snuffed out any chance of a famous Real Madrid comeback to reach the Champions League semi-finals after a 2-1 victory in the Bernabeu Stadium completed a 5-1 aggregate win on Wednesday.
Holders and 15-time winners Real never looked like clawing back a 3-0 deficit from last week’s quarter-final first leg, and when Bukayo Saka scored for the visitors in the 65th minute, their fate was effectively sealed.
Vinicius Junior seized on a rare defensive slip a couple of minutes later to rouse the home crowd, but it proved too little too late as Carlo Ancelotti’s side exited feebly.
Arsenal’s superiority over the two legs was underlined in stoppage time as Gabriel Martinelli burst through to score.
They will face Paris St Germain in their first Champions League semi-final since 2009.
“I think it’s such a special night for this club, it’s a historic night for this club,” said Arsenal’s Declan Rice, whose two sublime free kicks put his side in control last week.
“There was a lot of talk coming in about them coming back from the dead, they’ve done it so many times before. But we had so much belief and confidence from that first leg that we had enough to come here and win the game.”
A cacophony of noise greeted kickoff with the home fans fuelled by the hope of witnessing what would have been one of the greatest Champions League comebacks.
But Real’s knack of extricating themselves from difficult positions in a competition they won six times in the previous 11 seasons deserted them as they were comprehensively outplayed.
“Did we fall short of what we wanted in pure football terms? Perhaps,” Real captain Lucas Vazquez said. “They really are terrifically organised defensively.”
PENALTY MISS
Real needed a storming start, and Mbappe had the ball in the Arsenal net in the opening minutes but was offside when chesting in a Vinicius cross.
Arsenal were in no mood to simply sit and protect their lead, though, and Saka forced a great save from Courtois. They were handed the chance to kill off the tie when Raul Asencio needlessly hauled down Mikel Merino from a corner, and referee Francois Letexier eventually awarded a penalty after checking a pitch-side VAR monitor.
Saka opted for a Panenka-style chipped penalty, and Courtois clawed away the ball.
It looked like a potentially pivotal moment, and when Letexier pointed to the penalty spot at the other end after Kylian Mbappe tumbled under minimal contact from Rice, Arsenal’s night looked like taking a turn for the worse.
After five painstaking minutes, however, Letexier was again invited by VAR to view the monitor and to a chorus of whistles from the home fans, overturned his original decision.
That scare aside, Arsenal coped easily with Real Madrid’s famed frontline who were given little to work with.
Arsenal keeper David Raya was not required to make a save before halftime as Real’s predilection for hopeful crosses into the area proved easy pickings for the visiting defence.
Real’s Mbappe barely had a sniff of a chance as Arsenal showed great control and Saka made up for his first-half miss with a clinical finish after being sent clear by Merino.
William Saliba gifted Real a lifeline when he was caught in possession on the edge of his area, allowing Vinicius to score, but there was never any sense of panic in the visiting ranks.
Martinelli put the icing on the cake in added time, again from a Merino assist, to send Arsenal’s fans into raptures.
-Reuters
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