Everything seemed downhill.

Barça arrived at the Final Four in Cologne as a great favorite, but alas!

How dangerous that label always has.

The Catalans had won all the official matches of 2020.

39 nothing less

.

He had clearly surpassed the Kiel the two times they had met this course.

He exuded authority, arrived more rested and with a deeper staff.

But none of that was worth to overcome the German wall.

The Kiel now run by that old friend, Filip Jicha, was an impossible stone to break.

Barça's Decima will have to wait (33-28).

From very early on the German team had to protect

Sander Sagosen

.

The Norwegian received his second suspension when just over 10 minutes had passed, and spent the rest of the match dancing on the wire, entering to attack (unstoppable when he received seven goals in the race) and sitting down to defend.

If Kiel succeeded, it was thanks to the slow and safe pace that he imposed in attack, lowering the revolutions of a game that Barça could not accelerate.

The granite defense that

Pekeler and Wiencek

widen

made the Barça team sweat in static, which could not find a way to activate Cindric and Palmarsson, nor that fast and fluid game with which it usually shines and defeats its rivals.

He had to move in the mud and there the advantage was for Kiel, who after extra time and last minute casualties could hardly have endured a game at a gallop.

Thanks to that defense and the infallible hand of

Niclas Ekberg

from seven meters (the first three from the left, the next two from the right, the five inside), Kiel managed to manage an income of four goals in the first half ( 13-9).

And it would have been worse had it not been for Pérez de Vargas, who denied a very clear counter to Pekeler.

The action gave impulse to the Catalans, who in the next transition broke four minutes of drought and gave way to the best minutes of Xavi Pascual's team (15-15).

Superb Landin

It was one of the few sections in which Barça was able to loosen up and put speed, one of the few in which it seemed to take the initiative, but it was not a mirage.

The few times he managed to get past the defense, he was met by a superb Niklas Landin: the Danish goalkeeper grew bigger as the game went by and only conceded

five goals in the first 20 minutes

of the second half.

A moment of trance that, although it did not despair at Barça, it did allow Kiel to rebuild that five-goal lead that would ultimately be definitive (26-21).

Aleix Gómez

, the most successful of Xavi Pascual's (12/10), chained two scoring attacks, Fábregas caused Wiencek to be excluded at a sensitive moment, Cindric began to force what did not come out naturally all night, but nothing scratched the rent of the Kiel.

The German team, who had to squeeze their rotation in the

semifinal against Veszprem

, gave a lesson in resistance to slow down the Barça push, which only in the final minutes, with the outcome already written, ended in a din of monologues.

Not enough to bring down the Kiel of the former blue Filip Jicha, who joins Talant Dujsebaev and García Parrondo as the third to win the Champions League as a player (2010) and coach (2020).

Both against Barça.

According to the criteria of The Trust Project

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