After being outplayed for much of the first hour, Barcelona went into halftime down 1-0 to Levante forward Luis Morales, who converted a penalty awarded for a soft foul by Dani Alves.<\/p>\n
It could have been much worse for the visitors, as Marc-Andr\u00e9 her Stergen was called upon to save a second penalty just five minutes after his first-half heroics. If the first was a bit of a toss-up, this one was a no-brainer. Morales chose to hand it over to his flamboyant teammate Roger Mart, whose tame effort was easily saved.<\/p>\n
Barcelona, who grabbed their opportunity, received a much-needed wake-up call. Ousmane Demb\u00e9l\u00e9 cut inside and found Pierre-Emerick Aubmeyang, who made no mistake with his 5-yard header. \/When promising teenager Pedri stroked home an effort from the edge of the box four minutes later after a mazy run by Gavi, Levante will have been cursing their miss.<\/p>\n
Barcelona\u2019s defensive difficulties continued when Cl\u00e9ment Lenglet, a second-half substitution, handed away the game\u2019s third penalty. To tie the game level at 2-2, Gonzalo Melero stepped up and sent her Stergen the wrong way. De Jong came in in added time to knock home a Jordi Alba cross, giving Barcelona a 3-2 victory.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Barcelona needed a spirited second-half performance to come from behind and beat Levante thanks to a 92nd-minute header by Luuk de Jong. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":437,"featured_media":33958,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[238],"class_list":["post-11488","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-football","tag-fc-barcelona"],"reading_time":"2 min read","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.businessupturn.com\/sports\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11488","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.businessupturn.com\/sports\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.businessupturn.com\/sports\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.businessupturn.com\/sports\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/437"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.businessupturn.com\/sports\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11488"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.businessupturn.com\/sports\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11488\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.businessupturn.com\/sports\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/33958"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.businessupturn.com\/sports\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11488"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.businessupturn.com\/sports\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11488"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.businessupturn.com\/sports\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11488"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}