Last-kick Leverkusen set unbeaten record
It took another last-gasp equaliser but Bayer Leverkusen reached the Europa League final and broke a 59-year-old record to move to within four games of an unprecedented Invincibles season.
For the fourth time in their past six outings, Xabi Alonso’s side rescued a late draw to extend their unbeaten run to 49 matches in all competitions, moving past the mark set by the great Benfica team of the 1960s.
Leverkusen have also scored 17 goals in the 90th minute or later (excluding extra time), the jointmost of any side across Europe’s top five leagues, along with Liverpool.
Their hopes of remaining undefeated had been hanging by a thread after they fell 2-0 behind at home in the second leg of their Europa League semi-final against Roma, whom they had beaten away by the same score a week earlier.
An 82nd-minute own goal put Leverkusen 3-2 up on aggregate and back on track to reach this month’s final in Dublin, but they simply refused to settle for merely keeping their treble dream alive and defender Josip Stanisic equalised on the night with virtually the last kick of the game.
Only two more matches in the Bundesliga – of which they were crowned champions for the first time last month – a Europa League climax against Liverpool’s conquerors Atalanta, who beat Marseille 3-0 on the night and 4-1 on aggregate in the other semi-final, and a Dfb-pokal final against lower-league Kaiserslautern now stand between a club previously nicknamed “Neverkusen” and arguably the greatest season in European football history.
Last night’s match saw them go perilously close to throwing it all away when they conceded two penalties that Leandro Paredes scored to put Roma 2-0 up at the Bayarena.
But, as they have done so often before, they then lay siege to their opponents’ goal and Gianluca Mancini put through his own net before Stanisic found the bottom corner in the seventh minute of stoppage-time.
Leverkusen wing-back Jeremie Frimpong told TNT Sports: “We did it again. I think this one was the best one so far. You could see how intense it was. It is the best feeling.
“We had to dig so deep. It is the semi-final of the Europa League against a great team. We were the better team and the better team won.
“Nothing was going in. We kept missing but this season we have been phenomenal. You can’t count us out, not even for a second.
He added: “No one gives up. Everyone knows that if we go down, we will get a goal. OK, we scored to make it 2-1 and we were going through, but we still wanted more.”
Midfielder Granit Xhaka, who has yet to taste defeat for the new German champions since joining them from Arsenal last summer, said: “You see the desire from the team. We didn’t want to slow down. We wanted to score the next goal to keep going unbeaten – 49 times now. We are proud of it.”