Nico Paz scores twice as Como beat Man Utd 4-1
Como scored inside two minutes and added three more after the break to beat Man Utd 4-1 on Champions League Matchday 3, with Nico Paz scoring twice.
By Harvey Watkins,
Como beat Man Utd 4-1 at the Stadio Giuseppe Sinigaglia on Matchday 3 of the Champions League. Nico Paz scored twice, including the opening goal inside two minutes, and Anastasios Douvikas and Jacobo Ramón added the others before Joshua Zirkzee replied for the visitors in the 91st minute.
An opening goal inside two minutes
Paz put Como ahead in the second minute, which meant Man Utd were chasing the match for almost all of its duration. The score then stayed at 1-0 until half-time. A single-goal lead at the interval is rarely decisive, and on the first-half scoreline alone this was still a contest that could have gone either way. Whatever happened between the second minute and the break, neither side added to the scoreline for the rest of the half.
Three goals in 27 minutes after the restart
The match turned early in the second half. Douvikas made it 2-0 in the 49th minute, and from there the goals came quickly. Paz scored his second in the 57th minute to make it 3-0, and Ramón added a fourth in the 76th.
The pattern is worth noting. Como waited 47 minutes between their first and second goals, then scored three times in 27 minutes. The second goal was the one that changed the assessment. At 1-0 the visitors needed one goal to draw level. At 2-0, and then 3-0 within eight minutes of each other, the margin had moved well beyond that, and the fourth confirmed it.
A late reply for Man Utd
Zirkzee scored in the 91st minute to make it 4-1. It changed the margin rather than the outcome, and it arrived with Como already three goals clear. For Man Utd it was the only goal of their afternoon, and it came after Como had scored all four of theirs.
Paz at the centre of it
Paz was the central figure on the scoresheet. He opened the scoring in the second minute and restored the momentum with the third, accounting for half of Como's goals. The other two were shared between Douvikas and Ramón, giving Como three different scorers on the day. That spread is a reasonable indicator that the goals did not depend on one player alone, even if Paz was the one who scored twice.
What the result does and does not show
A 4-1 scoreline is emphatic, and the way it was built, with an early lead and then a burst of goals after half-time, makes it hard to read as anything other than a clear win for Como. It is still one match. It says a great deal about this fixture and much less about how either side's Champions League campaign will unfold from here. Those are questions for the matches to come, and a single result, however decisive, is a thin basis for broader conclusions.
For now, the facts of the day were plain enough: four Como goals, two of them from Paz, and a late consolation from Zirkzee that did nothing to alter the shape of the result.