Champions League: 4 reasons why Barcelona beat Liverpool 3-0
The first leg of the highly anticipated Champions League semi-final fixture between Barcelona and Liverpool took place at the Camp Nou on Wednesday night, with the Catalan giants posting a convincing 3-0 scoreline to establish themselves as the firm favorites to progress to the final in Madrid.
A goal from Luis Suarez and a Lionel Messi brace were enough to give Barcelona the victory and keep their quest for a historic third treble alive.
That scoreline, however, did not fully reflect how the match went as Liverpool gave a good account of themselves for most of the match and perhaps, deserved something more. In this piece, we shall be taking a look at four reasons why Liverpool lost the match to Barcelona.
#4 Barcelona’s incredible home form
Prior to the start of the match, Jurgen Klopp stated that the Camp Nou was no fortress and while this might hold true anywhere else, in the Champions League that is a farfetched statement, as the facts and figures show otherwise.
Incredibly, the Catalans have not lost at home in the Champions League since Bayern Munich condemned them to a harrowing 3-0 defeat in the semi-finals of the 2012-2013 season en-route their treble win in that campaign.
This entails that the Blaugrana have remained unbeaten at the Camp Nou in the Champions League for six years – a run encompassing 32 matches which has seen the Spanish giants draw just three matches in that sequence and which is also the longest stretch of unbeaten home games in the history of the Champions League.
To put this in perspective, the last time Barcelona lost at home in the Champions League, current Liverpool talisman Mohamed Salah was still cutting his teeth with Basel in his first season of European football, while Trent Alexander-Arnold was just a 15-year-old academy prospect, three years away from making his first team debut.
Nearly 100,000 fans descended upon the rafters of the Nou Camp to cheer their beloved team to victory in Europe once again, and they definitely were not disappointed as the players showed great determination not to disappoint them, and on the night, the Camp Nou indeed proved to be a fortress which got Klopp eating his words.