4-3: LATE HEARTBREAK AT THE METROPOLITANO

We came so close to claiming three precious points at the Riyadh Air Metropolitano, however the two-goal advantage was ultimately not enough to take anything home from the match. Atlético de Madrid remain unbeaten at home this season. After 57 minutes, great goals from Dodi Lukébakio, Isaac Romero and Juanlu Sánchez looked to be threatening this record, but it wasn't to be. This was an impressive, brave performance with clinicality in the final third, but it was not quite enough to achieve the desired result.

The first chance of the game came to the home side, but Antoine Griezmann could only hit the bar from Julián Álvarez's cut-back. Two minutes later, however, Rodrigo De Paul put Atlético de Madrid in front with a wonderful long-range effort after we had failed to clear our lines. Lukébakio brought us back on level terms just minutes later with a powerful right-footed drive from the edge of the area following Nemanja Gudelj's short corner. Just past the half-hour mark, Kike Salas won the ball back well before opening up the Atlético defence with a terrific through-ball to Isaac. One-on-one with Jan Oblak, our striker made no mistake, finding the bottom corner of the net to give us a 2-1 lead.

Ultimately, our three goals were not enough

The hosts looked to get back into the game before the half-time whistle. Connor Gallagher came close having rounded keeper Álvaro Fernández, but José Ángel Carmona got back in time to deny the Englishman. They thought that they had found an equaliser on the stroke of half time when Álvarez netted, but the former Manchester City man's strike was chalked off by VAR due to Guiliano Simeone being offside in the build up. In the second half, we looked to build upon our lead, and that is exactly what we did in the 57th minute. An excellent, flowing team move was started and ended by Juanlu. The ball was worked to Salas on the left-hand side, who whipped in a teasing cross to the back-post where our young full-back was on hand to finish past Oblak. Two goals in two games for Juanlu and a second assist of the night for Salas gave us a 3-1 lead with little over half an hour to play.

Our two-goal cushion only lasted five minutes, Griezmann halving the deficit. Saúl Ñíguez came off the bench to face his former team but couldn't prevent the Atlético fightback. Samu Lino found the bottom corner from 25 yards with ten minutes still to play before Griezmann managed his second of the night deep into injury time. Defeat is a tough result to take, especially given the quality of the performance for the majority of the 90 minutes. This was Atlético de Madrid's ninth consecutive win in all competitions. Our attention now turns to next Saturday's match against Celta de Vigo, which has extra special emotional value as it will be Jesús Navas's final match at the Ramón Sánchez-Pizjuán before his retirement.