Lionel Messi’s free-kick sends Barcelona eight points clear of Atlético Madrid

Lionel Messi’s 600th goal carried Barcelona closer to his eighth league title with the club. As the ball hit the net the Camp Nou chanted his name. It was early still and there would be nervous moments to overcome, Atlético Madrid refusing to relinquish their challenge without a fight, but he had done it again, as they thought he might.

At the end, there was a huge roar here: another big night had the No 10’s signature scrawled across it. “If Messi had been wearing an Atlético shirt, we would have won,” Diego Simeone, the Atlético manager, said. His opposite number, Ernesto Valverde, said: “There’s no one like him in the world. I don’t know what would have happened [if he’d been on the other team] nor do I want to imagine it.”

The title might be heading elsewhere for a start. A single goal was enough but what a goal it was. The clock showed 26 minutes and the ball was 25 yards from goal, just left of centre as Jan Oblak, the Atlético goalkeeper, looked at it. The problem was that it was one thing seeing it, another stopping it. It was, after all, Messi standing there and he bent the ball in a long, sharp arc towards the top corner, swinging fast. Oblak scrambled across, diving, hand outstretched but could not keep it out. It was the third free-kick Messi had scored in a week, one a game for three games, and his sixth this season. Both are records in La Liga, where Barcelona now have an eight-point lead. “It’s not definitive but we have taken a step,” Valverde said.

Five games ago that lead had been 11 but three draws – against Espanyol, Getafe, and Las Palmas – saw it cut to five, the narrowest it had been since Week 6. Since Diego Costa’s arrival at Christmas, Atlético had been relentless, winning eight and drawing one of nine matches, closing in and contenders once more.



Source: theguardian

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