No Ronaldo, Juventus suffer season’s first league defeat

GENOA, March 17 

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Juventus fell to their first Serie A defeat of the season on Sunday as Genoa ran out 2-0 winners days after the Turin club’s Champions League heroics against Atletico Madrid.

Stefano Sturaro, who joined Genoa on loan from Juventus in January before the deal was made permanent, put the home side in front in the second half before fellow substitute Goran Pandev secured the shock result with 10 minutes remaining.

Cristiano Ronaldo inspired a remarkable European comeback for the Italian champions on Tuesday when he scored a hat-trick to overturn a 2-0 first-leg defeat against Atletico and send his side through to the quarter-finals with a 3-2 aggregate win. However, the Portuguese was left out of the matchday squad for the trip to the Stadio Luigi Ferraris and Juve coach Massimiliano Allegri was left frustrated as Genoa took points off his side for the second time this season, having drawn 1-1 in Turin in October. “I expected a different Juventus,” Allegri said. “We did not put in a good performance, we made some mistakes.” 

Juve had dropped points just three times this season going into the game, with draws against Genoa, Atalanta and Parma, while they were unbeaten overall in the top-flight for the last 31 rounds, since losing 1-0 to Napoli on 22 April 2018. — Reuters

Late Reus goal completes comeback win

BERLIN: Borussia Dortmund captain Marco Reus scored a stoppage-time winner to complete a 3-2 comeback victory at Hertha Berlin on Saturday and reclaim top spot in the Bundesliga, three points ahead of champions Bayern Munich. Dortmund scored through Thomas Delaney in the 14th minute and Dan-Axel Zagadou two minutes after the restart to cancel out Salomon Kalou’s first-half double. Yet despite laying siege to the Hertha box for much of the second half and with the hosts down to 10 men in the 85th minute, they had to wait until deep into stoppage time for Reus to find space in the box and fire home his 15th goal of the campaign. Bayern can return to the top with a win over Mainz 05.

Attendance record for women’s club game

MADRID: Atletico Madrid and Barcelona smashed the attendance record for women’s club soccer on Sunday as 60,739 supporters turned out to the Wanda Metropolitano stadium to see a 2-0 Barca win which shook up the title race. Atletico were leading Barca by six points at the top of the Liga Iberdrola heading into the game but second-half goals from Asisat Oshoala and Toni Duggan halved the deficit with six games remaining. The previous attendance record for a women’s game in Spain was Athletic Bilbao’s game with Atletico Madrid in the Copa de la Reina on January 30, when 48,000 supporters crammed into the San Mames stadium in Bilbao. The former world record attendance for a women’s club match was a game between Mexican sides Monterrey and Tigres in 2018, where 51,000 fans showed up. The biggest attendance for any women’s game remains the 1999 World Cup final between the United States and China which saw 90,000 fans flood into the Rose Bowl Stadium in Los Angeles. reuters