Montevideo City Torque completes stunning comeback over Cienciano, storms into Sudamericana semifinals

The stadium wouldn't stop roaring, and even the scorer himself wasn't quite sure what had just happened. That's how wild the night was when Montevideo City Torque flipped the quarterfinal tie on its head and punched a ticket into the final four of the Copa Sudamericana.

The Ciudadanos had arrived with a steep hill to climb: in the first leg they'd fallen 2-0 to Cienciano. But this Thursday, in the return match, they rewrote the entire script. First it was Salomon Rodriguez, whose brace leveled the aggregate score at 2-2 and breathed new life into the team. Then, just as the match was slipping away, came the final blow: in the 90th plus 2nd minute, Nahuel Da Silva slammed home the 3-0 that sealed the trip to the semifinals.

The forward, just 21 years old, didn't even see the ball go in. As he sprinted off to celebrate, chaos broke out on the field, with pushing and shoving between players from both sides, something Da Silva admitted he didn't even notice in the moment.

On the goal, I didn't even get to see the ball go in. I heard the crowd scream, I'd never heard a stadium roar like that, and it just hit me all at once, I couldn't hold it in. There was some shoving going on (between players from both squads) and I had no idea. I couldn't even see the ball go in.Nahuel Da Silva

The attacker didn't hide his emotion in the mixed zone and described how he spent the hours leading up to the match, focused solely on finding the goal that would seal qualification.

I've got all kinds of feelings right now. A lot of joy, what this club means is huge. All night at the hotel I was thinking about who might score the goal that gets us through, and lucky for me it was me. This is a dream, making history at this club that opened its doors for me and made me a professional. This jersey is going up on the wall and it's never coming down.Nahuel Da Silva

A group that found its strength from within

Beyond the goal and the qualification, Da Silva wanted to highlight something about the locker room: the idea that talent alone isn't enough when an opponent turns up the pressure. He referenced a message that, he said, has been repeated often by the coaching staff led by Marcelo Mendez alongside his assistant Leonardo Lopez.

What this group has is huge, there's tremendous quality, but heart, desire, the soul of the people, that can't be bought. Today that was proven, we didn't just play with the ball, we played with heart. Like Marcelo and Leo always say, one hand on your heart and the other on your guts. A lot of us in this group have been through the second division, and today we got to make history.Nahuel Da Silva

Having flipped the tie against Cienciano, Montevideo City Torque now sits among the top four teams in the 2026 Sudamericana, a place that, judging by the words of its goal scorer, feels like something this group had been chasing for a long time.