Barcelona welcome Eibar to Camp Nou on Tuesday evening live to the possibility of ascending to third place in La Liga should they record a victory.
Sevilla beat Villarreal 2-0 at the Sanchez-Pizjuan earlier in the evening, leapfrogging their opponents in the process and paving the way for the Blaugrana to prove their comeback isn’t simply another false dawn.
If you filled the Camp Nou with every resident of Eibar, there'd still be 72,000 seats left over. Madness what they're doing in this game.
— Euan McTear (@emctear) December 29, 2020
Barcelona haven’t lost domestically since their embarrassing reverse at Cadiz, and come into the game off the back of a resounding 3-0 victory at Real Valladolid last time out.
Eibar face a tall order in Catalonia despite Barcelona’s poor form and the fact that Lionel Messi, nursing a knock, was in the stands. The Basques have lost eleven of their last 12 against the Blaugrana in all competitions.
The hosts could have taken the lead inside the first ten minutes. Ronald Araujo was deemed to have been fouled in the box after a lengthly VAR review, with the referee awarding a penalty that Martin Braithwaite went on to miss, pulling wide left.
Shortly before the hour mark, Eibar struck first blood. Araujo, a very able performer for the Blaugrana so far this season, made an uncharacteristic error to allow Kike Garcia to pounce and coolly finish to send the Basques 1-0 up.
Barcelona equalised in the 67th minute. Junior Firpo, who did well to assist Braithwaite earlier in the evening only for the Dane’s effort to be ruled out for offside, repeated the trick with an accurate centre for Ousmane Dembele, who came on at half-time, to finish accurately.
Dembele’s goal in so beautiful 😍pic.twitter.com/nQ3vsrnb2S
— josue (@DembouzChiefV2) December 29, 2020
