PAMPLONA, Spain, May 15 (Reuters) – Osasuna secured a surprise 2-0 home win over Atletico Madrid in LaLiga on Thursday as headers by Alejandro Catena and Ante Budimir moved them another step closer to European football. <\/p>\n
Defender Catena headed in from a corner to put the hosts in front in the 25th minute before Budimir doubled Osasuna’s advantage eight minutes from fulltime, moving them up to ninth in the standings. <\/p>\n
Osasuna are now level on 48 points with eighth-placed Rayo Vallecano, who occupy the spot for the Conference League qualifiers as five LaLiga teams are headed to the Champions League this season. <\/p>\n
Osasuna will hope to return to a European competition nearly two decades after they reached the semi-finals of the Europa League, back then known as UEFA Cup, in 2007. <\/p>\n
They reached the Conference League playoffs last season but were eliminated by Club Brugge 4-3 on aggregate. <\/p>\n
Atletico, who have been out of the title race and had already secured a Champions League spot, remained third with 70 points after 36 games. <\/p>\n
Diego Simeone’s side, who beat Real Sociedad 4-0 on Saturday with striker Alexander Sorloth scoring all four goals inside 30 minutes, looked uninspired and went behind when Catena converted Bryan Zaragoza’s corner kick to give Osasuna the lead. <\/p>\n
Sorloth had an excellent chance to equalise eight minutes later with a diving header but Osasuna goalkeeper Sergio Herrera made a superb save. <\/p>\n
The encounter was largely forgettable after that until Budimir nodded home late on. <\/p>\n
Enzo Boyomo showed some impressive dribbling skills before passing to Kike Barja, who crossed into the box for Croatian striker Budimir to score his 20th league goal of the campaign. <\/p>\n
Budimir is third in the LaLiga scoring charts this season, behind Kylian Mbappe (28) and Robert Lewandowski (25). <\/p>\n
Osasuna host 16th-placed Espanyol on Sunday before visiting Deportivo Alaves, in 17th, in their final fixture. <\/p>\n
Atletico will play Real Betis and Girona to end their season. (Reporting by Anita Kobylinska in Gdansk Editing by Christian Radnedge) Estadio El Sadar Spain Osasuna Atl\u00e9tico Madrid <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"PAMPLONA, Spain, May 15 (Reuters) – Osasuna secured a surprise 2-0 home win over Atletico Madrid in LaLiga…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":99190,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5174],"tags":[1029,1614,2000,299,5187,35975,7325,48084],"class_list":{"0":"post-104419","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-eu","8":"tag-atletico-madrid","9":"tag-champions-league","10":"tag-eu","11":"tag-europe","12":"tag-european","13":"tag-european-football","14":"tag-laliga","15":"tag-osasuna"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/104419","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=104419"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/104419\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/99190"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=104419"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=104419"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=104419"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}