It’s certainly a case of mighty Goliath taking a major fall as Villarreal humbled Juventus with a humiliating 3-0 win in Turin to go through 4-1 on aggregate to the quarter-finals of the Champions League.
Penalties from Gerard Moreno and Arnaut Danjuma, topped off with Pau Torres’s tap-in for the final crème-de-la-crème finishing touch – all in the final quarter of an hour – were more than sufficient for Unai Emery and his men to see off the Italians at the Allianz Stadium and make the last-eight draw.
Villarreal slammed the Old Lady with three knockout punches after back-pedaling for the majority of the match, playing possum and being content to hold off and bide their time as the hosts’ potency kept decreasing as the match progressed.
They were loudly booed off by the home crowd who watched their team shrink from a promising start and bounce off a yellow wall before being bundled out of the competition as Italy are now without a single representative in this season’s Champions League as it moves into its latter stages.
Juve’s lamentable run of form leading to their second embarrassing defeat since the end of November has also affected their league title race at home.