I liked the early days when there were two type of football fans, one Manchester United fans and the other who hated them. But times have changed, Barcelona have dominated in the Europe in the past decade and they have taken the tag away from Manchester United. Manchester United now, are nowhere to be seen in the Champions league.
Barcelona did what no one ever thought off. Having convincingly beaten 4-0 by PSG in the first leg , Barca were written off. PSG fans were on the moon. But Barcelona were determined to battle it out and bring PSG fans back to Earth. And finally, after fighting for 95 long minutes, Barcelona won the match, the battle and the war. Some were jumping in absolute joy, some were sad and many could not believe what they just saw.
PSG fans were sad, but Real Madrid fans were even more sad. Their rivals had written their names in the history of the game and the league. Nobody had ever over turned a 4 goal deficit.
PSG fans were out of words or maybe still not believing what hit them. Therefore, Madridistas came to their support. Real Madrid fans have been more vocal about the match, more than PSG fans themselves. Madridistas had to come up with an answer to downplay their achievement -They simply said we don’t put ourselves into these kind of situations ever, we will never go 4-0 down. Some said Barcelona can never win without the officials helping them and it was evident in this match too when hand ball and penalty claims where denied to PSG.
Barcelona were like Indian engineers, they would only wake up and work hard the night before exams. This is the story of 90% engineers in India, they won’t bother until their arse is on fire.
The situation was same for Barcelona. It was a do or die moment. They had two options, to fight like Spartans, or play shabbily as they did in the first leg, buy the referee (as claimed by fans worldwide) and march on to quarter finals. You will see a number of videos on the internet where one can see all the refereeing mistakes from the game. Here is a short clip which might suggest that PSG might have also lost because of bad refereeing, or to quote Real Madrid fans – “Referee helped Barcelona”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wHgOkIxEhFM
There have been reports that referee Deniz Aytekin would be demoted due to his performance in the match. And an online petition was also signed by over 200,000 people to have a replay of the game. Guess who set up the petition – Real Madrid fan. A Real Madrid fan, Luis Melendo Olmedo, has set up the petition on change.org for following reasons: “Incidents that gravely prejudiced PSG as a result of German referee Deniz Aytekin, whose actions refereeing benefited Barcelona”. Olmedo went on to list 13 key decisions that he believed had gone against PSG. Most notable was Luis Suarez’s “hopeful swimming pool dive” which was awarded as a penalty in the 89th minute. But the author of the petition also believed Gerard Pique, Neymar and Suarez should have seen red during the match. And he pointed out the potential penalty not given to PSG for a foul Javier Mascherano later admitted he had committed on Angel Di Maria. And you might not be wrong if you say that half or maybe 90% of signing the petition would be Real Madrid fans.
In the end, whatever one might say, it was an outstanding achievement. To comeback from four goals down and win 6-5 on aggregate is not easy. Even PSG had a lot of goal scoring opportunities that went begging. It was definitely one of the best matches in the history of the game.
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