Mbappé Bicycle Kick Wins It! Real Madrid Beat Dortmund

Kylian Mbappes stunning bicycle kick helped Real Madrid beat Borussia Dortmund 3-2 in the quarter final of the Club World Cup shot on Saturday.

After missing out on the group stage of the competition due to gastroenteritis the French super star returned to the headlines as he acrobatically scored a goal to put Los Blancos two goals up in stoppage time of the second half with a cross of Arda Gulers.

That was his highlight strike, as Madrid were already two goals up representing Gonzalo Garcia, who is the joint-top goalscorer in the tier, and Fran Garcia once they scored on crosses made by Guler and Trent Alexander-Arnold.

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Maximilian Beier cut the deficit to one goal in the 92 nd minute slotting home just inside the penalty area, but Mbapp came back to give Madrid back a two-goal margin two minutes later and then he apparently paid tribute to late Diogo Jota by making signs indicating a 20, the number the Portuguese carried on the back of his shirt at Liverpool before dying in an automobile crash on Thursday.

That was not the end of the drama because moments after the resulting kick off, Carney Chukwuemeka played through Serhou Guirassy who was tripped in the box by Dean Huijsen. Huijsen was carded red and Guirassy scored the penalty to bring Dortmund back into the game once more.

It would have been almost done after the last kick of the game, however, a 99 th time shot by Marcel Sabitzer was saved in a very impressive way by Thibaut Courtois, to the great relief of many of the 76,611 visitors to MetLife Stadium.

Xabi Alonso, the head coach of Real Madrid said the wild finish to the match is what it is, it is football. “The truth is that up until the 80th minute, up until 2-1, we controlled the game quite well.”

The Spaniard did admit that “too many things happened in a short period,” but added: “We’re in the semis, we’re happy, and hopefully it’s helped us not to get carried away, not to stop playing with that connection, with that presence of mind in every minute.”

After the French team defeated Bayern Munich 2-0 earlier on Saturday, the opponent of Madrid in the semifinal will be European champion Paris Saint-Germain.

One of the heroes in the PSG empathic 5-0 ride over Inter Milan in the Champions League final on May, Dsir Doue, gave the team an early lead in the 78 th minute, bouncing the ball into the left-foot shot and flanked Manuel Neuer on his near post.

Even after Willian Pacho and Lucas Hernandez were both dismissed in the next 15 minutes, with the former getting a red card for a high tackle on Leon Goretzka and the latter getting one after elbowing Rapha Guerreiro, PSG ensured that they ended up on the winning side in the 96 th minute when Achraf Hakimi dodged past the Bayern backline and assisted Ousmane Dembelle to score.

This battle was marred, though, by an injury to Bayern attacker midfielder Jamal Musiala, which happened to be serious. Minutes before the halftime whistle, Musiala was knocked off ball by Gianluigi Donnarumma in the PSG box and fell in pain holding his left ankle that was turned in an unnatural position.

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“I’ve rarely been so angry at halftime, not against my players. There’s many things in life that are important, much more important than this. But in the end, for these guys it’s their life,” Bayern head coach Vincent Kompany told reporters afterward, per Reuters.

“And someone like Jamal lives for this and he came back from a setback. And then it happens in the way it happens and you feel powerless"

“When I’m sat here next to you now, the thing that gets my blood still boiling at the moment, it’s not the result. I understand this is football. But it’s the fact that it happened to someone who, one, enjoys the game so much but also very important for us.”

Although both of the games on Saturday were well attended, interest to watch the other semifinal of the competition with Chelsea playing against Fluminense appears to be lost with the price of tickets to the match plummeting to the equivalent of 13.40 from 473.90 earlier in the week, AP reported.

The world football body has employed a dynamic pricing model to this year Club World Cup and in the past it has lowered the prices as low as $11.15, when it is Chelsea versus Palmeiras semi-final and Fluminense versus Al-Hilal semi final according to AP.

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