Gimnasia Mendoza wins with a single shot, leaves Newell's feeling robbed

The scoreboard reads 1-0 in favor of Gimnasia Mendoza, but the story of the match is that of a Newell's Old Boys side that left Victor Antonio Legrotaglie empty handed after creating far more than its rival. It took just one shot on target for the Mendoza club to walk away with all three points in a game where it was, by a wide margin, the less dominant team.

The first half reached its peak tension right around the half hour mark. In the 26th minute, Santiago Solari put the ball in the net off a corner kick, but Newell's celebration didn't last long: VAR stepped in to review the play, and two minutes later, in the 28th minute, the final call came down, leaving the score still blank. The goal didn't count, and the Rosario side was left with the feeling that the match could have gone very differently from that point on.

Newell's kept pushing. Solari tried again before the break and Rodrigo Herrera also had a header of his own, but the first half ended scoreless despite the visitors' control of the game.

The strike that changed everything

In the second half, just as the match seemed to be heading toward a logical outcome for the team doing most of the creating, the play that decided everything arrived. In the 57th minute, Agustin Modica received a pass from Matias Vargas and finished with a right footed shot from outside the box that curled into the top corner. Gimnasia Mendoza, with barely a handful of clear chances all match, found the goal right when it needed it most.

The rest of the second half turned into a Newell's monologue in search of the equalizer. Matias Coccaro, Luca Regiardo, Bruno Cabrera, Jeronimo Gomez Mattar (who came on from the bench) and Walter Mazzantti all tried their luck at different points, including a shot from Martin Ortega that grazed the crossbar in the 86th minute. None of it went in. Gimnasia Mendoza, leaning on its defense, held onto the narrow lead until the final whistle, even through five minutes of stoppage time that Newell's tried but failed to make count.

The numbers tell a different story

The match statistics make it clear who carried the weight of the game:

Newell's dominated possession, corners and passing, on top of racking up five big chances to none for the home side. Our own xG estimate for the match, calculated from shot locations, tells an equally lopsided story: 2.605 for Newell's against just 0.413 for Gimnasia Mendoza. It's rare for a team to win having generated so little compared to its opponent.

The result also runs counter to our pre-match projection. Beforehand, our model gave Gimnasia Mendoza a 42% chance of winning, against 26% for Newell's and 32% for a draw, with expected goals of 1.27 for the home side and 0.96 for the visitors. The total expected goals figure (2.23) ended up fairly close to reality, though the split went the opposite way of what was forecast: it was Newell's that created vastly more, and yet it was Gimnasia Mendoza that walked away with the win on the back of one clean strike.

What the result means

With this win, Gimnasia Mendoza climbs to 20 points in Group A, sixth in the table with a record of 6 wins, 2 draws and 4 losses in 12 matches played. Newell's Old Boys, meanwhile, stays on 17 points, in eighth place, with 4 wins, 5 draws and 3 losses over the same number of matches. The gap between the two in the standings is just 3 points, a margin that doesn't quite capture what played out on the field that day: a Newell's side that attacked, kept pushing, and ran into VAR first and its opponent's finishing second, and a Gimnasia Mendoza side that made its one clear chance of the afternoon count.