It was chaos.
The clock read 93:38 when Frenkie de Jong slid in on a rampant Alvaro Carreras and brought him down. The score read Benfica 4 - 4 Barcelona. It took a whole minute for the arguments around the foul, and De Jong's yellow card, to die down. When Benfica floated in their freekick, the time read 94:44.
Nicolas Otamendi was bullied away from the ball, but it fell to Alexander Bah who lofted it back towards the back post, where Zeki Amdouni kept it alive. As the ball bounced back towards the edge of the Barca box, Leandro Barreiro took over.
93:53 read the clock as he headed the ball over the melee of players in front of him and charged forward... if he got a shot away, that would be the game. Florentino Luis headed the ball on, a bit, and Barreiro got to it first. Fermin Lopez was closest to him and bumped him, before Wojciech Szczesny stumbled out and slapped the ball away and cleaned out both Barreiro and Lopez. The ball hit De Jong's chest (who had been nearby), bounced off a falling Lopez's shoulder and thigh, before somehow, he clattered it clear, mid-fall.
As Lopez cleared, three players were on the ground, another 11 players (plus the ref) inside the Barca box. Most in Benfica red were screaming their heads off for a penalty. Pure chaos.
But then again, it'd been chaos for all the 93 and a half previous minutes, really. If you grew up a Barcelona fan in the Pep Guardiola era, it's the kind of mayhem that you'd never have associated your football club with. But Hansi Flick -- with his absurdly high line and his Johan Cruyff-esque 'you score 4, we'll score 5' philosophy -- revels in chaos. And so do his Barca team.
Having trailed 3-1 to a Vangelis Pavlidis hattrick, they'd clawed it back to 3-3, went 3-4 behind within four minutes of that equaliser and scored another leveller with four minutes to go in the ninety. It wasn't just the score; it was the manner of some of them.
Benfica first took the lead at 2-1 when Szczesny had straight up flattened Alejandro Balde and handed Pavlidis an open goal. Barca's first equaliser came when Benfica keeper Anatoliy Trubin smashed a clearance straight at Raphinha, some twenty odd yards in front of him, and it bounced off the Barca man's head and into the net. Ronald Araujo had finished neatly at the near post, into his own goal. There had been three penalties and serious shouts for more. It had been fun, a throwback entertainer that threw most modern football principles out the window. It had been Chaos, capital C.
But when Lopez hooked it away, danger cleared a minute past the stipulated regulation time, when the clearance bounced over Pedri and out to Ferran Torres you'd have thought it was over now. 'Deep breaths everyone, that was a wild one, a classic. But enough. Let's all go home now.'
Except... Ferran Torres collected the ball and almost without pause, swept a delicious ball out forward to the one Barca player who had not been anywhere near their box. Raphinha.
In the middle of a remarkable resurgence, he was just the player Barca wanted to see on the ball. Too quick for anyone, he raced forward down the right flank, head bent against the beating rain, mind set on one objective. As he cut in, though, a furiously backtracking Carreras caught up. Which is when Raphinha slowed time down.
You see, after cutting in, in one smooth motion, Raphinha cocked his leg to shoot, and everyone assumed it was going far post -- that was simply the most logical choice. Carreras dove in front of him, trying to cut out the angle. Trubin started diving to his right. But amid that wild chaos, at high-speed in the pelting rain, under all that pressure, Raphinha adjusted... and pulled his shot near post. Through Carreras legs, past a completely wrong-footed Trubin, into the back of the net.
95:08. Benfica 4 - 5 Barcelona. Cue bedlam.
It was a goal of remarkable calm to decide a game of extraordinary chaos... and for that Raphinha Dias Belloli takes our Moment of the UCL mid-week.