Gimnasia snatches last-gasp draw against Atletico Tucuman with stoppage-time penalty

There were barely five minutes left when Lautaro Godoy put Atletico Tucuman ahead with a right-footed strike from outside the box. The Juan Carmelo Zerillo stadium went silent. But soccer has a way of turning things around: deep into stoppage time, referee Pablo Dovalo was called to the VAR monitor to review a foul by Leonel Di Placido on Franco Torres inside the area, and what looked like a painful defeat turned into an agonizing 1-1 thanks to the penalty that Marcelo Torres buried with his right foot into the top left corner, in the 94th minute.

The result leaves a bittersweet taste for Gimnasia La Plata, who played a match in Argentina's Primera Division that they dominated from start to finish against an Atletico Tucuman side that barely showed up except for the play that nearly won them all three points.

A lopsided back and forth

For nearly the entire first half, Gimnasia piled up chances without reward: Ignacio Miramon tested the keeper in the 3rd minute and again in the 14th, Maximiliano Zalazar missed three chances between the 29th and 40th minutes, and German Conti came close with a header in the 43rd. Atletico Tucuman, for its part, barely threatened, with a shot from Nicolas Lamendola in the 5th minute and another from Ignacio Galvan in the 38th. The first half ended 0-0, a scoreline that undersold the home side's performance.

In the second half, the story repeated itself: Gimnasia kept creating chances (Ignacio Fernandez, Zalazar, Miramon again, Agustin Auzmendi, Lucas Janson) without finding the net. Then, just as the match seemed headed for a scoreless draw, Godoy popped up to make it 0-1 for the visitors in the 82nd minute, assisted by Ramiro Ruiz Rodriguez. The away goal came almost out of nowhere, on one of the few clear chances Julio Cesar Falcioni's team had all match.

Gimnasia, coached by Ariel Pereyra, refused to fold and found their reward in stoppage time: the foul by Di Placido on Franco Torres inside the box, confirmed after a VAR review, gave Marcelo Torres the chance to equalize from the penalty spot, and he did not miss.

The numbers back up the dominance

The gap between what each team generated is clearly reflected in the match statistics:

According to our expected goals estimate calculated from the match's shots, Gimnasia generated 1.869 xG against just 0.402 for Atletico Tucuman, a gap that confirms what the chances on the scoreboard showed, even though it did not translate into a win.

Before kickoff, our projection gave Gimnasia La Plata a 44% chance of winning, 30% for a draw and 26% for Atletico Tucuman, with an estimated 1.40 expected goals for the home side and 1.03 for the visitors. The outcome, with 26 shots from the home team against just 8 from the visitors and a draw snatched at the death, looks closer to the tie we projected than to a clear Gimnasia win, though it arrived by a route nobody expected: a last-gasp goal after falling behind on the scoreboard.

What the result means in the standings

In Group B of the standings, Gimnasia La Plata came into this match in sixth place with 19 points from 11 matches played, while Atletico Tucuman sat ninth with 14 points from 11 matches, a gap of 5 points between the two sides. The draw does not change much for either team, who remain stuck in the middle of the table.

What remains from this match is the image of a team, Gimnasia, that did almost everything right for 90 minutes except score, and that ended up needing a VAR review in stoppage time to avoid leaving empty handed. For Atletico Tucuman, on the other hand, the 1-1 tastes like a point that slipped away in the final instant, after having been five minutes away from taking all three.