Leicester stun Sevilla to rekindle fairytale; Juve through
PARIS: First, the Premier League title. Now, the Champions League quarter-finals.
Is there no end to Leicester City’s football fairytale? The improbable rise of a previously unheralded club from central England touched new heights on Tuesday when Leicester beat Sevilla 2-0 to reach the last eight of Europe’s elite club competition, courtesy of a 3-2 aggregate victory.
Two years ago to the day, Leicester were in last place in the Premier League after a dour 0-0 home draw with Hull City.
On Friday, their name will be in a pot alongside the cream of the continent Barcelona, Real Madrid, Bayern Munich, Borussia Dortmund, Juventus and two others in the Champions League draw in Nyon.
Juve coasted into the quarter-finals with a 1-0 win over Porto in Turin after a first-half penalty and red card ended the Portuguese side’s lingering hopes of a comeback.
Paulo Dybala converted the penalty three minutes before the break to complete a 3-0 aggregate win for the Serie A side after Porto defender Maximiliano Pereira blocked Gonzalo Higuain’s goalbound shot with his arm and was sent off.
“We proved a lot of people wrong and pulled off the impossible again,” said Leicester captain Wes Morgan, one of the scorers inside their atmospheric King Power Stadium. “We will take whoever comes.”
That’s the kind of uncompromising attitude that carried Leicester to the Premier League title last season at odds of 5,000-1 and is sweeping the team to another potential miracle.
No team is likely to feel comfortable in the cauldron that is the King Power Stadium on nights like these and Juve captain Gianluigi Buffon said he was keen to avoid Leicester in the next round.
“Let slip the dogs of war,” urged a message on a giant banner behind one of the goals before the match. It was a line from ‘Julius Caesar’, a play by William Shakespeare the English playwright who has the same surname as Leicester’s new manager.
Craig Shakespeare recently took over from Claudio Ranieri, the coach who orchestrated Leicester’s sensational Premier League title triumph but was fired because the team had found itself fighting a relegation battle in its championship defence.
Shakespeare has three wins from three matches in charge, and has got the team playing back at last season’s levels.
“We tried to make it as uncomfortable as we could for Sevilla,” said Shakespeare, who was pictured on that banner holding a dog on a leash.
Down 2-1 from the first leg last month in Spain, Leicester took the lead in the 27th minute when Riyad Mahrez curled in a free kick that Morgan turned home at the back post.