Pierre-Emerick Aubameyang was Africa’s star performer in Europe’s major leagues last weekend, maintaining his excellent start to life at Barcelona with further goals as the Catalan giants thumped Real Madrid 4-0 in LaLiga.
Elsewhere, there were yet more goals from Victor Osimhen in Serie A while Moustapha Cisse marked his debut in the Italian top flight with a late winner for Atalanta only weeks after representing a refugee team in the eighth tier of Italian football.
Aubameyang had already showcased his quality for Barcelona before Real Madrid became his latest victims in Sunday’s Clasico.
Auba became the third-highest all-time scorer in the UEFA Europa League when he netted against Galatasaray last week, taking his tally in the competition to 24 goals, having also become one of only three Barca players this century — Samuel Eto’o and Zlatan Ibrahimovic being the others — to have scored five goals in their first six La Liga outings for the club.
None of those achievements compared to Sunday, however, as Auba scored twice and registered an assist to steal the show as Barca humbled Real 4-0 at the Bernabeu.
Aubameyang was denied early by Thibaut Courtois before he opened the scoring just before the half-hour mark, when he headed home a delicious cross from Ousmane Dembele. The goal extended his run of scoring against Real Madrid to five consecutive matches, having punished Los Blancos during his time with Borussia Dortmund.
He added his second goal to round out the scoring in the 51st minute — after Ronald Araujo and Ferran Torres had also been on target — calmly beating Courtois one-on-one after being played in behind the Real backline.
The Gabon skipper could have had a hat trick — he missed from close range after being picked out by Jordi Alba — but his lovely flicked pass to assist Torres’s goal capped a truly outstanding display.
Barcelona’s convincing victory took them up to third on LaLiga ladder, but they remain 12 points behind leaders Real following a miserable start to the season. Nonetheless, this performance ended Barca’s run of five consecutive Clasico losses and demonstrated just how far the Camp Nou heavyweights have come under Xavi Hernandez, and how far Aubameyang’s personal renaissance has come since his final troubled months at the Emirates Stadium.
This was the first time this century that a player has had a hand in three goals in his first Clasico appearance, and the 32-year-old is reaffirming his status among the finest strikers in the world. And much as African great Eto’o enjoyed a fine record in the fixture — scoring four goal in eight attempts in LaLiga — he never netted twice against Real in a single fixture while in Barca colours.
Aubameyang made a reference to Dragon Ball Z as he celebrated one of his goals, and he later explained to beIn Sports what was running through his mind as he put Real to the sword.
“I had one wish, it was to simply win here,” he said. “I thought a lot about my family, a lot about my grandparents who are no longer with us, but here, I’m happy to have scored for them today.”
Perhaps Aubameyang’s performance will go some way to silencing the remaining critics who have chided him as a flat-track bully able to perform only against weaker opponents.
If Auba’s impact at Barcelona has been unexpectedly rapid then Cisse’s climb up the Italian football pyramid has been meteoric.
The 18-year-old was playing in the Seconda Categoria — the eighth tier of Italian football — less than a month ago, but he marked his startling ascent from the amateur game with the winner on debut for Atalanta against Bologna on Sunday.
The Guinean was signed by Atalanta’s academy only on Feb. 22, having impressed while playing for refugee team Rinascita Refugees, and he was fast-tracked to the club’s first team after shining at youth level.
Having scored three goals in four games for Atalanta’s youth side, he was included among the substitutes against Genoa on Mar. 13 and was then summoned from the bench at the Renato Dall’Ara with the scores level and 17 minutes to play on Sunday.
He wasted little time in making an impact, beating Lukasz Skorupski with a tidy finish after being played in by Mario Pasalic, and was held aloft by his teammates at the final whistle.
“I’m very happy for Atalanta and for Cisse, because he already settled in really well during training,” teammate Merih Demiral told DAZN. “He deserved this goal and from the next game he will do even better.”
Cisse began playing with Rinascita Refugees in 2019, when he was 16, having arrived in Italy from the Guinean capital of Conakry.
“He’s been training with us for some time, but if we had all our strikers available he probably wouldn’t have come to Bologna with us,” Atalanta assistant coach Tullio Gritti said.
“It’s proof that there’s always some quality in backup, and you simply have to have the courage to go and get it.
“The choice of Cisse is a stroke of genius from [Atalanta head coach Gian Piero] Gasperini, seeing how many qualities the boy has, not least his shooting.”
Elsewhere in Italy, Osimhen boosted Napoli’s title hopes with both of their goals in a 2-1 come-from-behind victory over Udinese — after scoring twice against Hellas Verona in Serie A the previous weekend.
Never before had he scored back-to-back braces, and the double took his tally for the season to 11 league goals — equalling Union Berlin‘s Taiwo Awoniyi as the leading Nigerian scorer in Europe’s major leagues.
Intriguingly, Osimhen’s goals were his first at Napoli’s ground — the Stadio Diego Armando Maradona — since mid-October, and head coach Luciano Spalletti will surely be targeting an improvement in the Super Eagles frontman’s home form as they look to win their first title since 1990.
Atop Serie A, Algeria‘s Ismael Bennacer scored the only goal of the game as Milan stuttered to a 1-0 victory over struggling Cagliari. He was also the Rossoneri‘s saviour against Bologna in October — when his teammates were drawing a blank — and the North African’s interventions could prove critical come the season’s end.
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