Real Madrid and Paris Saint-Germain quickly snuffed out hopes of epic comebacks by Manchester City and Chelsea in the Champions League on Tuesday.
Instead, it was tiny Bodø/Glimt on the receiving end of a historic second-leg fightback in the round of 16.
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Protecting three-goal leads from the first leg, Madrid won 2-1 at City — helped by an early red card to City captain Bernardo Silva — to advance 5-1 on aggregate and defending champion PSG scored twice in the first 14 minutes on the way to a 3-0 victory at Chelsea. That sealed an 8-2 aggregate success.
Bodø/Glimt, the Norwegian club from a fishing town of around 55,000 people north of the Arctic Circle, also had a 3-0 lead from the first leg but was blown away 5-0 by Sporting Lisbon after extra time.
There’s only been one bigger comeback in the Champions League: Barcelona’s storied “Remontada” against PSG in 2016-17.
Sporting’s reward is a quarterfinal matchup with Arsenal, which beat Bayer Leverkusen 2-0 for a 3-1 aggregate win and kept alive its hopes of a quadruple of trophies this season.
Bodø/Glimt has charmed the soccer world
The Bodø/Glimt fairytale is over — but only after an unlikely streak of wins that has charmed the world of soccer.
After beating Man City and Atletico Madrid in the final two rounds of the league stage to squeeze into the playoff round, the northernmost team ever to play in the Champions League defeated Inter Milan — last season’s runner-up — home and away to advance to the round of 16.
Winning 3-0 in its 8,000-capacity Aspmyra stadium last week didn’t prove enough against Sporting, which dominated throughout in the return match and scored through Gonçalo Inácio, Pedro Gonçalves and Luis Suarez to take the game to extra time.
There, Uruguay left back Maxi Araújo scored in the 92nd minute to put Sporting ahead on aggregate for the first time and Rafael Nel added a fifth in stoppage time.
“People thought it was almost impossible,” Araújo said, “but we showed that we believed in ourselves and turned it around. We played a perfect game.”
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AP soccer: https://apnews.com/hub/soccer