It is a goal that only Luis Muriel can score.
Atalanta won in the 95th minute against AC Milan, scoring with a creative backheel after thirteen minutes on the pitch. As the commentator would say after the goal, yes, “it’s a goal that Luis Muriel can score”.
Before coming on in the 82nd minute, the 32-year-old veteran Colombian striker had played just 231 minutes for Atalanta this season in Serie A, starting just one in 12 appearances. Gian Piero Gasperini had relied on relatively young people such as Ademola Lookman, Charles de Ketelaere and Gianluca Scamacca.
It had worked at the start of the season, but a run of one win in six games in all competitions had seen Atalanta come into this match desperate to replace their luck. De Ketelaere, looking to escape his Milan nightmare, stepped in A promising performance against his parent club, and Atalanta twice took the lead through Lookman. Milan came back to equalize twice, and after Luka Jovic found the net in the 80th minute, the atmosphere in Bergamo was tense.
Luis Muriel enters. To make fun of it.
Gasperini opted to update Lookman and De Ketelaere with Aleksei Miranchuk and Muriel in the 82nd minute, which didn’t exactly please the crowd.
Over the next 12 minutes, the Colombian had five touches and a complete pass. Not exactly the functionality of a supersubmarine. The game seemed destined for a draw, but Davide Calabria got his goal in the third minute of stoppage time. And that glimmer of hope was all Muriel needed to come back to life.
The play started off without causing any damage: Miranchuk wasted the ball in midfield with a loose pass to Christian Pulisic, before beating it to the American as the ball advanced towards Muriel, falling deep into a central area. The Colombian returned the ball to Teun Koopmeiners on the right and the danger appeared.
Miranchuk had made a diagonal run across the pitch down the right lane inside the box, drawing Alessandro Florenzi and Fikayo Tomori to him as Koopmeiners made a clever pass to the Russian. He receives the ball in the box, turns towards goal, but his touch is strong and Tomori tries a tackle. The twinkling-toed Russian, however, channeled his inside Baryshnikov, regained momentum and delivered a pass with the outside of his left foot to Muriel, running into the box.
The Colombian was followed by Yacine Adli, which perhaps explains why his touch was heavy. Of course, after breaking into the area, Muriel’s momentum also caused him to pass wide, instead of towards passal, as he would have liked. Zero passes in Serie A all season, with Mike Maignan excelling in his own way and with a very limited angle: there was no way to get the ball into the net.
There was only one option – and only Muriel could execute it.
“At that moment you don’t think, you do it. You can’t work out for that. I had drifted a little bit and there was no other way to score from that position,” said the Colombian striker after the game. game.
On the run, the only option was a heel and only a solitary angle from which he would locate the net. Maignan blocked all other attempts, but remained unanswered as Muriel’s backheel went past him and flowed into the far corner. Bergamo erupted, as the Atalanta players ran to Muriel to celebrate.
Very overdue in the day, entry @Luisfmuriel09
Unbelievable, incredible#AtalantaMilan | @Atalanta_BC pic. twitter. com/ZrPkU9GsGa
– Lega Serie A (@SerieA_EN) December 10, 2023
The quality of the finish was such that Milan’s players were not even disappointed as they conceded the winning goal in stoppage time, but were left stunned. There is no way around this ending, it is special to Muriel and there is nothing we can do about it. .
Muriel’s lineout and finish (which were her first and only touches in the box when she came in) took less than a second, but it was such a clever purpose that Serie A collected footage from 16 other angles, in a 202-second video. A goal from the contender of the season, coming from a striker who needed 12 appearances to score his first goal this season.
Only Luis Muriel.