BARCELONA – Winner by a beating against Navalcarnero (0-6), Granada will host Barcelona in the quarter-finals of the Copa del Rey, a round drawn next Friday in Madrid with a one-match tie between Tuesday and Thursday of next week. The duel between the Andalusian club and the azulgrana stands out as the most striking and completes the picture with the matches Betis-Athletic Bilbao, Levante-Villarreal and Almería-Sevilla.
With Barça having won 28 of the last 30 Cup qualifying rounds it has played as the top favorite, the four qualifying matches will go to the semi-finals, already in two matches and whose first game will be played the following week. matches played in the second week of March.
The game between Granada and Barcelona will be the second between them, and also in Los Cármenes, in less than a month, after Koeman’s team won 0-4 in LaLiga on January 9, in which it was the third loss for Andalusians. this season after 14 games since September.
Oddly enough, Granada will be the ninth game Barça plays away from Camp Nou of the first ten it has played since the beginning of 2021.
The Spanish Cup precedents between the two go back to 1949 and 1959, and they haven’t seen each other since. In the quarter-finals of the 1949 edition, the first leg, played in the old Los Cármenes stadium, ended with a draw at two, while in the second leg, played in Les Corts, Barça was thrashed by an unquestionable 5-0, with two doublets. by Marcos Aurelio and Basora. The azulgrana team would eventually be eliminated by Valencia, ultimately champions, in the semi-finals.
The second and last time they met in the cup was in the 1959 final, the only one in its history played by Granada and which, played at the Santiago Bernabéu, was successfully defeated by Helenio Herrera’s Barça that weeks before. had already won. League and won 4-1, doubling Kocsis, Eulogio Martínez and Tejada against the lone goal of Arsenio Iglesias.
EQUALITY
If Barça appears as the favorite over Granada, which was eliminated in the semi-finals last season by Athletic Bilbao for double the goals scored in the opposite field, the same will happen in the duel in which Almería, the only representative of the 2nd division, will play. host Sevilla.
Eliminated by Mirandés in the fourth round last season, Sevilla, the last cup champion in 2010 (when they defeated Atlético at Camp Nou 2-0), played their last final in 2018, beaten by Barça in the Metropolitan. For Almería it will be the first time that I have played the quarter finals since 2011, when they lost in the semi-finals to Barcelona.
More equality is assumed in Levante-Villarreal, teams that never made it to the final, and in Betis-Athletic Bilbao, protagonists of the historic 1977 final and who beat the Andalusian team in the penalty shoot-out (8-7) after the match end with a draw in second.
Athletic, champion of the tournament for the last time in 1984, lost the 2009, 2012 and 2015 finals against Barcelona while Betis were looking for their first final since 2005, which marked their second trophy after a win (2-1) of Osasuna.