Borussia Dortmund took a giant stride towards the Champions League quarter-finals with a comfortable last-16 first-leg win at Zenit St Petersburg.<\/p>\n
Dortmund made a rapid start as Henrikh Mkhitaryan swept in a loose ball after a dangerous run from Marco Reus, who cracked in a second 77 seconds later.<\/p>\n
Oleg Shatov’s low second-half shot gave Zenit hope, before Robert Lewandowski drilled in Dortmund’s third.<\/p>\n
Hulk’s vicious penalty reduced the gap, only for Lewandowski to pounce again.<\/p>\n
The Poland striker\u00a0ensured the German side have a healthy – and fully deserved – two-goal advantage heading into next month’s second leg.<\/p>\n
Dortmund, who were beaten by Bayern in last season’s Champions Leagues final\u00a0at Wembley, dominated their Russian hosts as they put their domestic woes to one side in a ruthless attacking display.<\/p>\n
Jurgen Klopp’s team have struggled in the Bundesliga this season, with the weekend’s 3-0 defeat at lowly Hamburg leaving them 20 points adrift of leaders Bayern.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Borussia Dortmund took a giant stride towards the Champions League quarter-finals with a comfortable last-16 first-leg win at Zenit St Petersburg. Dortmund made a rapid start as Henrikh Mkhitaryan swept in a loose ball after a dangerous run from Marco Reus, who cracked in a second 77 seconds later. Oleg Shatov’s low second-half shot gave […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":2219,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[115,60],"tags":[37],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/africanexaminer.com\/sports\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2216"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/africanexaminer.com\/sports\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/africanexaminer.com\/sports\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/africanexaminer.com\/sports\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/africanexaminer.com\/sports\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2216"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/africanexaminer.com\/sports\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2216\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2218,"href":"http:\/\/africanexaminer.com\/sports\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2216\/revisions\/2218"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/africanexaminer.com\/sports\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2219"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/africanexaminer.com\/sports\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2216"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/africanexaminer.com\/sports\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2216"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/africanexaminer.com\/sports\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2216"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}