Barcelona beat Arsenal 2-0 in the first leg of their Champions League round-of-16 clash overnight. That's the straight news. The much stranger, more interesting news is the manner in which they won and the weird dinosaur video which predicted it.
Huh?
Allow us to explain. There's a website called thesportbible.com. Said website has an active Facebook page. On said page you'll find the video below, which shows the three marquee Barcelona players -- Messi, Neymar and Suarez* -- as dinosaurs taunting the hapless Arsenal goalie Petr Čech.
*Note: Suarez is the guy who bites people, so turning him into a T-Rex is all kinds of ironic.
Now this was all very funny and amusing until, spookily, it became reality. The trio did indeed bare their collective teeth. Čech is one of the best goalkeepers of the last 20 years. But even he was always going to struggle against Barcelona's three-pronged attacking threat, which is so lethal its quality may be unrivalled in the history of European club football.
Here's the beautiful passage of play that resulted in the first goal. Neymar to Suarez, Suarez back to Neymar, Neymar to Messi. Only one thing was going to happen with Messi in the box, and it did. As the amusing Spanish commentator says in the video below "Goooooooooooooooooooooooaaaaaaaalllll".
For the geometry fans out there, here's a diagram of what happened:
This, people, was goal-a-saurus and Arsenal's Champions League chances are now virtually extinct. It happened at Arsenal's home ground too, so the home crowd was not exactly enraptured. Or should that be en-Raptored?