Mats Hummels on Tuesday headed in the only goal as Borussia Dortmund stunned Kylian Mbappe and Paris Saint-Germain in their UEFA Champions League semi-final second leg, winning 1-0 on the night and advancing 2-0 on aggregate to next month’s final at Wembley.
Hummels struck five minutes into the second half at the Parc des Princes and PSG were unable to muster a response, the home side all out of luck as they hit the woodwork four times in total.
Dortmund, who sit fifth in the German Bundesliga, were never expected to go so far and would be underdogs in the June 1 showpiece regardless of whether they face old rivals Bayern Munich or Real Madrid.
Photo: AFP
It would be their first final since 2013 when, remarkably, the match was also played at Wembley and Juergen Klopp’s Dortmund lost to Bayern.
Hummels played in that final and here, 11 years later, he was the hero as Dortmund built on the advantage given to them by Niclas Fuellkrug’s goal in the first leg.
“It’ll take us a bit of time to realize that, but we’re looking forward to it extremely,” Dortmund coach Edin Terzic told broadcaster Amazon Prime of getting to the final. “We did it somehow, making it to London.”
Dortmund veteran Marco Reus said that “nobody expected us to make it.”
“Tomorrow nobody will ask how we did it. They will just see the name Borussia Dortmund in the final at Wembley,” Reus told Amazon Prime. “Today it was clear that we needed to suffer and that we needed some luck, but what the lads did was crazy, crazy.”
The 34-year-old, who announced on Friday he would leave his boyhood club at the end of the season, said the feeling of returning to European soccer’s showpiece event was “indescribable.”
“Now we better win it, otherwise that would really suck,” Reus said.
However, the story of this semi-final was as much about PSG’s failure in another crunch knockout tie in the competition.
They have still never won the trophy despite all the money invested by their Qatari owners since the 2011 takeover, and there will be no dream send-off for Mbappe.
The 2018 World Cup winner, who had been hoping to play his last game for the club in the June 1 final, would leave when his contract expires after this season, with Real Madrid his likely next destination.
PSG would be left to reflect on how they failed to get their hands on the biggest trophy of all during Mbappe’s seven years at his hometown team.
Mbappe was one of four PSG players to hit the woodwork in the second half, and coach Luis Enrique complained that his side — who had 31 attempts on goal — had been “unlucky.”
“I don’t really like to talk about bad luck,” Mbappe said a short while later. “When you are good, you don’t hit the post, you score. I tried to help the best I could. When I say we needed to be more clinical, I am the one who has to be scoring, but this is life, we need to pick ourselves up.”
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