\n<\/p>\n
The Champions League semi-finals presented us with two contrasting outings. One was a scintillating, red-hot goalfest \u2013 the other was a cagey, tactical affair from two outfits who looked to frustrate the other.<\/strong><\/p>\n But who made it into our team of the week? One thing is for certain \u2013 it was much easier to pick out the attacking players than it was the defenders this week.<\/p>\n None of the four goalkeepers kept a clean sheet in their respective semi-final games, but David Raya was easily the best of the bunch.<\/p>\n He made some excellent saves against Atletico Madrid, including a snapshot effort from Julian Alvarez that almost caught the Spanish international off-guard.<\/p>\n Achraf Hakimi was desperately, desperately unfortunate in PSG\u2019s thriller against Bayern Munich. He was excellent until he suffered a hamstring injury that could see him ruled out for the rest of the season and the World Cup.<\/p>\n Putting forth a solid contribution at both ends of the pitch, making some brilliant tackles and notching up an assist, let\u2019s hope the Moroccan international can enjoy a speedy recovery.<\/p>\n This wasn\u2019t William Saliba\u2019s best performance by any stretch \u2013 but as we\u2019ve mentioned, the semi-finals contained very few strong defensive performances. <\/p>\n Saliba did everything he had to do, making some important clearances throughout, but the Frenchman has certainly had better games than this.<\/p>\n Yes, Dayot Upamecano might have conceded a whopping five goals against PSG \u2013 but he did score one, so that has to count for something. <\/p>\n Upamecano can\u2019t really be blamed for much of Bayern Munich\u2019s defensive frailties on Tuesday night. Every time they went forward, they committed almost all of their players to every attack, leaving Upamecano and Jonathan Tah to fight an uphill battle on the counter-attack.<\/p>\n \n <\/div>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The Champions League semi-finals presented us with two contrasting outings. One was a scintillating, red-hot…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":3193,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"pagelayer_contact_templates":[],"_pagelayer_content":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3192","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-chelsea"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/playball.com.ng\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3192","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/playball.com.ng\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/playball.com.ng\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/playball.com.ng\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/playball.com.ng\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3192"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/playball.com.ng\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3192\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/playball.com.ng\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/3193"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/playball.com.ng\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3192"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/playball.com.ng\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3192"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/playball.com.ng\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3192"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}GK: David Raya<\/h2>\n
RB: Ashraf Hakimi<\/h2>\n
CB: William Saliba<\/h2>\n
CB: Dayot Upamecano<\/h2>\n