What began as a tale of the sheer force of Dortmund striker Erling Haaland became the story of VAR madness.
Borussia Dortmund beat Sevilla 2 – 1 at home to secure qualification to the next round of the Champions League 5 – 4 on aggregate.
Erling Haaland scored both Dortmund’s goals in a pulsating, insane game of football that Sevilla almost turned on its head.
Sevillla started the game like a team one nil down from the first leg, and dominated the early stages. If Sevilla scored first, Dortmund’s chosen tactic of sitting off them and playing on the break would have been questioned.
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Ultimately, they conceded the first goal. In the 35th minute, Marco Reus squared the ball to Erling Haaland who tapped the ball into an empty net. As if the goal just wasn’t challenging enough, he hoisted Reus into the air in frenzied celebration.
In the second half, the referee will have been thanking the gods that the game was in an empty stadium. A frantic few minutes began when Haaland scored what would have been the second were it not for a mind boggling VAR sequence.
Like a piece of heavy agricultural machinery, Halaand simply brushed the defending Diego Carlos aside and finished from a tight angle. Then, the referee was called over to review the incident. It was initially thought he was checking for handball, although the video showed there was none.
Instead, the referee disallowed the goal and awarded Dortmund a penalty for a foul on Haaland over a minute before the ball was in the net. His penalty was saved by Bono, only to be retaken after Bono was seen coming off the line. Haaland dispatched the rebound, ending a breathless, perplexing chain of events.
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Sevilla equalised with a penalty of their own in the 68th minute, but their pressure didn’t amount to genuine threat afterwards. They got their second goal from a corner right at the death in the last minute, but it was too little too late.
From the calamity emerges the burgeoning reputation of Halaand.
