Cristiano Ronaldo was back to justify his status as the best ever in Europe's elite competition as his hat-trick overturned a 2-0 first-leg deficit against Atletico Madrid to send Juventus into the Champions League at Turin in Italy.
He brought the tie level with two headers on either side of half time, before capping off a remarkable performance by smashing in the tie-winner from the penalty spot four minutes from time.
In an interview with Ronaldo after the interview he said, “this is why Juve brought me in, to help on magic nights like this". There were speculations that Juventus may be knocked of the elite league due to the first leg lose in Madrid few weeks ago.
It was his 124th goal in the Champions League and eighth hat-trick in the competition. He now has scored 24 goals against old foes Atletico Madrid in 33 appearances He now has 125 UCL goals in 160 appearances, 63 of those have come in the knockout stages. Ronaldo has now equaled Lionel Messi's tally of 8 hat tricks in the Champions. This is 1st time Juventus have overturned a first-leg defeat to go through since 2005/06. This is the 1st time that someone’s Atlético was knocked out of UCL by a different team than Real Madrid.
Amtoine Griezmann, Atletico Madrid midfielder said, he fills guilty for the loss as he said that he did not perform well.
“we did not enter the game, we knew it was going to be difficult and we chose a bad day to screw it up, everyone is f****ed up and feel guilty because I could not keep up with the pace of the game.”
Meanwhile Ex CR7 team, Real Madrid, is out of elite league as it was booted out by Ajax last week.
