Carlos Bacca and Sevilla quality wrecks Dnipro’s fairytale ending to Europa League destiny

Sevilla retained their Europa League crown by beating Dnipro Dnipropetrovsk 3-2 with a double from Carlos Bacca in an exciting final at Warsaw’s National Stadium on Wednesday

Carlos Bacca celebrates scoring the winning goal for Sevilla in the Europa League final against Dnipro. Kai Pfaffenbach / Reuters / 27 May, 2015
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WARSAW // The scenes at the end were familiar as Sevilla’s players cavorted on the pitch having beaten Ukraine’s Dnipro 3-2 in a thrilling Europa League final.

The Spanish club became the first to win the Europa League four times – remarkably, it is only nine years since they won the competition for the first time.

Even more astonishingly, winger Jose Antonio Reyes has won it four times in the past six years, having played in both of Atletico Madrid’s triumphs.

As the mass of red shirts celebrated at one end, the blue and yellow at the other had only the consolation that they had at least come close to a symbolic victory.

The demands for a victory to, as the captain Ruslan Rotan put it, “give a little joy” to the people of eastern Ukraine had added great emotional pressure, but it was not that they wilted under it. Rather they simply came up against a better team and, in Carlos Bacca, a striker in great predatory form.

After a day in which the sordid side of football took centre stage, this was a game to cleanse the palette, a remarkably open match packed with ­excitement.

Dnipro’s strength throughout this campaign has been their miserly defending, but there was little sign of that.

For the first seven minutes they came under severe pressure – and then took the lead.

Nikola Kalinic, only playing because of an injury to Yevhen Seleznyov, flicked on Artem Fedetskiy’s long ball for Matheus, and then advanced into the box to guide the Brazilian’s cross into the bottom corner with a fine header.

There was no let-up though in the intensity of the Sevilla pressure and they had had plenty of chances when they equalised after 28 minutes, Grzegorz Krychowiak cracking in a snapshot from just inside the box as Dnipro failed to clear a corner.

Three minutes later, Bacca ran onto a Reyes pass and rounded goalkeeper Denys Boyko to give Sevilla the lead.

At that, such was their dominance, it seemed all but inevitable that Sevilla would win ­comfortably.

Dnipro, though, had other ­ideas and rallied to take the game to their opponents for the first time.

The highly-rated Yevhen Konoply­anka had already drawn a fine save from Sergio Rico when Rotan dinked in a free kick a minute before half time.

The Sevilla assault kept coming, though, and with 17 minutes remaining, Vitolo jabbed a pass through for Bacca who finished instinctively. It was not a great goal, but it was a goal of a truly great goalscorer.

This time, Dnipro, emotional energy spent, could not come back. It had been an extraordinary run – and one that will be remembered fondly not only in Ukraine – but for all the talk of destiny and what a victory might signify, they ran into the hard fact of Sevilla’s quality.

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