Al Ain head coach Hernan Crespo heaped praise on his team after the UAE club reached the Asian Champions League semifinals with a stunning win over Cristiano Ronaldo’s Al Nassr in the quarterfinal in Riyadh on Monday night.
Al Ain, which won the first leg 1-0 at home on March 4, took a 2-0 lead in the second leg for a 3-0 aggregate lead only for the Saudi club to draw level and take the game to extra time.
Ronaldo then scored Al Nassr’s fourth goal of the night from the penalty spot in the 118th minute.
The second leg eventually ended 4-3 in favour of Al Nassr, but with both teams locked at 4-4 over two legs, a penalty shootout was needed to decide the winner.
It’s in the shootout that Al Ain showed nerve of steel, scoring three, while Al Nassr managed just one.
Crespo, the legendary Argentinian striker, was delighted with Al Ain’s lion-hearted performance against the star-studded Saudi club.
“I think our performance was of a really high level and if you analyse both games, we deserve to go through,” Crespo was quoted as saying by the Asian Football Confederation website.
“We are very happy with the result. I think everybody watched a great game between two great opponents and we played really very well.”
The Argentine, who became the most expensive player in the world in 2000 when he joined Lazio from Parma for €56 million in Serie A, said his players dealt with the pressure of facing a strong team really well.
“We played really well and maybe, we didn’t deserve to arrive to penalty kicks. We deserved to win earlier,” he said.
“I want to congratulate my players because they played with great personality and they showed they are a big group.”
Al Nassr’s foreign imports Miroslav Brozovic, Alex Telles and Otavio all failed to score from the spot as the UAE club advanced to the semifinals, where they will face either Al Hilal or Al Ittihad — both from Saudi Arabia — next month.
Al Ain goalkeeper Khalid Eisa made amends for a disappointing display when he saved Brozovic’s opening penalty and, with Soufiane Rahimi, Kaku and Sultan Al Shamsi all converting, Otavio’s miss meant Al Nassr were eliminated.
The shootout brought a dramatic end to a thrilling clash at Al-Awwal Park that featured seven goals and a red card, with Al Ain building on their first-leg lead during the opening 45 minutes.
Rahimi, the scorer of Al Ain’s first-leg winner, put the visitors in control with goals in the 28th and 45th minutes but Abdulrahman Ghareeb’s strike five minutes into injury time kept Al Nassr’s hopes alive.
Otavio’s low drive was redirected into his own goal by Khaled Eisa six minutes after the restart and Alex Telles levelled the aggregate scores 18 minutes from time with a low free kick that flew through a crowd of players to beat Eisa.
Al Nassr’s Ayman Yahya was sent off for a vicious two-footed lunge on Bandar Al Ahbabi eight minutes into extra time and, a minute later, Al Shamsi thought he had scored the winner when he capitalised on Raghid Najjar’s handling error to poke home.
But Ronaldo scored from the penalty spot with two minutes remaining, after the Portuguese striker was taken down in the area by Saeed Jumaa, to take the game to a shootout.
Ronaldo was the only one of Al Nassr’s four penalty-takers to successfully convert as Al Ain advanced to the last four for the first time since 2016.
“It was a really difficult and dramatic match. We expected that Al Nassr would attack from the first minute,” Al Ain goalkeeper Eisa said.
“Our players worked really hard, and I am so proud that we remained stable and focused even after Al Nassr scored their second goal. (with inputs from Reuters)