Coming off a tantalizing victory against Manchester City sealed by an 89th minute Matt Doherty winner just 43 hours earlier, fifth-place Wolves made Liverpool sweat as the Reds held on 1-0 to record their 10th straight victory in the Premier League and run their unbeaten league home streak to 50 games on Sunday.
With three goals in the opening 20 minutes of today’s 3-2 victory over Athletic Bilbao, Real Betis captain Joaquín became the oldest ever hat-trick scorer in LaLiga history.
Mexican internationals Andrés Guardado and Diego Lainez both got the start for Betis at the Benito Villamarín, but it was Joaquín — at the age of 38 years and 140 days — who stole the show with the first three-goal game of his glittering 21-year career.
After hitting a hat-trick against Lithuania last Thursday to bring his international tally up to 98, Cristiano Ronaldo entered today’s match between Portugal and 96th-ranked Luxembourg with his eyes firmly set on becoming the second-ever footballer to reach the century mark for his country. Portugal won 2-0, but it was Bruno Fernandes who opened the scoring for the away side before Ronaldo registered number 99 following a tap-in from millimeters out.
The Seattle Sounders captured their second MLS Cup in four years by defeating Toronto FC 3-1 at CenturyLink Field on Sunday afternoon.
The Sounders scored three second half goals to secure the victory in front of the largest sporting event crowd in CenturyLink Field history — 69,274 roared their approval when a deflected Kelvin Leerdam effort gave Seattle the lead in the 57th minute before Víctor Rodríguez’s cool finish doubled the advantage in the 76th. Raúl Ruidíaz cemented the club’s second-ever title with a strike of his own in the 90th.
Scoring a hat-trick in Europe’s premier club competition is no mean feat, especially so as an adolescent teenager between the ages of 13 and 19. The list of players to have accomplished the goalscoring achievement reads like a who’s who of the world’s greatest talent since the tournament’s adoption in 1992.
In fact, only 19 players have multiple Champions League hat-tricks to their name, with both Lionel Messi and Cristiano Ronaldo having accomplished the task a staggering eight times. Nobody else has recorded more than three.
As Cristiano Ronaldo and Lionel Messi continue their collective assault on the record books for the men’s game, Ada Hegerberg is quietly racking up an impressive résumé of her own in the women’s game. She now tops the list of Women's Champions League top scorers — and she’s only 24.
Cristiano Ronaldo scored the 700th goal of his professional career, but Portugal’s 13-game unbeaten streak was brought to an abrupt end by Ukraine in Kiev on Monday. The victory secured qualification to Euro 2020 for Ukraine, and it was a continuation of the country’s glorious renaissance under the direction of 43-year-old manager Andriy Shevchenko.
It was Shevhenko himself who scored Ukraine’s last goal at a major international tournament — that coming at Euro 2012 — but based on today’s display, this is a team that will certainly do more than make up the numbers next summer.
They formed a four-man wall. They had a defender lie prone behind the wall to block a low shot. They dropped another defender to the goal-line to clear any effort at the near post. They had Czech international Tomáš Vaclík between the sticks.
It didn’t matter.
Lionel Messi’s first goal of the 2019-20 season flew in from 23 yards out, avoiding it all with astonishing ease.
Things are heating up in the Champions League (read: Real Madrid bottom of Group A) and there’s no surer sign of the increase in dramatics than managers getting booked. In a first for the Champions League, coaches can now be on the receiving end of both yellow and red cards from the match official, and although Match Day 1 of the competition came and went without history being made, Match Day 2 brought the moment we’d all been waiting for.