Fernando Torres hailed a fantastic night for Atletico Madrid and mission accomplished as they claimed a 1-0 first-leg victory over Bayern Munich in their Champions League semi-final on Wednesday night.
Although they take only a slim advantage to Munich for the second leg on Tuesday, the Spanish striker revealed Los Rojiblancos were delighted to take the early initiative.
Torres, who struck the post in the second half after an exquisite piece of skill to set up his shooting opportunity, said: “It was a fantastic night and I’m happy for all Atletico supporters. We’ve got what we wanted which was to get the scoreline in our favour.
“We suffered and kept suffering, kept fighting, that’s what we do. Bayern have a level few teams have but we kept on doing our thing.”
Atleti defended for much of the game but reduced Bayern, in the main, to chances from distance with Polish striker Robert Lewandowski suffering a frustrating evening and Pep Guardiola unable to muster much penetration from his team.
Incredible solo goal by Saul Niguez to give Atletico Madrid a 1-0 semi final win over Bayern!#Football #UCLhttps://t.co/8G6NQUoJsL
— Luxbet (@luxbet) April 28, 2016
Torres’ strike partner Antoine Griezmann said: “We’re very happy with a win. In the second half, we saw that Bayern are a great team.
“It was better for us when we came back to 4-4-2. It may be not so nice to see from the stand or in TV but our game is our game: defend strongly and convert our chances.”
Bayern lost the first legs of their semi-finals in the previous two seasons to Real Madrid and Barcelona on their way out of the competition and captain Philipp Lahm lamented their inability to score an away goal.
“We didn’t think we’d have so many chances to score in the second half as we did, but we didn’t use them,” Lahm told ZDF. “You have to use them in games like this, but we still have 90 minutes to come.”
