FORT LAUDERDALE, Fla. \u2014 Lionel Messi and Inter Miami CF are three wins away from their first Major League Soccer championship.<\/p>\n
The 38-year-old forward led the way for host Miami on Saturday night, with Messi scoring a pair of first-half goals and adding two assists as the Eastern Conference’s No. 3 seed ousted sixth-seeded Nashville SC 4-0 in the decisive Game 3 of their first-round series in the MLS Cup playoffs.<\/p>\n
Tadeo Allende scored a pair of goals about three minutes apart \u2014 both set up by Messi \u2014 in the second half to blow the game open for Miami, which outscored Nashville 8-3 in the series. Messi had a hand in all eight of those goals, scoring five and assisting on the other three.<\/p>\n
Miami won the series opener 3-1 at home on Oct. 24, but Nashville forced a rubber match with its 2-1 win in Music City on Nov. 1. Saturday’s match marked the fourth in a row between the clubs, with Miami winning the regular-season finale 5-2 on Oct. 18 in Nashville.<\/p>\n
Miami will go to second-seeded FC Cincinnati for an Eastern Conference semifinal match \u2014 while the first round of the playoffs uses a best-of-three format, its single-elimination play from this point forward \u2014 that will be played Nov. 22 or Nov. 23. Cincinnati also had to win a Game 3 in the first round, beating seventh-seeded Columbus 2-1 on Saturday after the Crew won 4-0 on Nov. 2. Cincinnati won the series opner 1-0 on Oct. 27.<\/p>\n
Cincinnati went 1-0-1 against Miami during the regular season, winning 3-0 at home on July 16 and playing to a scoreless draw in Fort Lauderdale on July 26. Messi was in the lineup for the first meeting, but not the second, having been suspended by the league for skipping the MLS All-Star Game<\/p>\n
“We know Cincinnati will be a tough test,” Miami’s Jordi Alba \u2014 who is retiring when this playoff run ends \u2014 said after his 100th appearance with the club.<\/p>\n
Alba also missed the July 26 match for the same reason as Messi.<\/p>\n
Messi is the heavy favorite to win his second straight MLS MVP award, and if that happens he would be the first back-to-back winner in league history. He also won the Golden Boot as the league-leading scorer with his 29-goal regular season, just finalized a new three-year deal to remain with the club through 2028, and seems to be playing his best soccer of the year at the perfect time for Miami.<\/p>\n
The former Barcelona star from Argentina signed with Miami in July 2023, and he provided a major lift to his MLS club ever since, both on and off the field.<\/p>\n
This is the first time Miami has gotten this far in the MLS playoffs. South Florida’s MLS predecessor \u2014 the long-defunct Miami Fusion \u2014 got as far as the league’s semifinals in its final season in 2001, but this is new territory for Miami’s current top-level team.<\/p>\n
A year ago, in Messi’s first full season with the club, Miami lost Game 3 of a first-round playoff series at home as the winners of the Supporters Shield \u2014 signifying the most points in the regular-season standings \u2014 were ousted by Atlanta United FC.<\/p>\n
Not this time. Messi saw to that.<\/p>\n
With four Nashville defenders around him, Messi scored from the top of the 18-yard box in the 10th minute for a 1-0 lead. And the second goal was from nearly the same spot, albeit much easier.<\/p>\n
Mateo Silvetti controlled a long pass and got past a Nashville defender, attracting the attention of goalkeeper Joe Willis. Silvetti pushed the ball toward Messi, who had nothing but empty net to shoot at in the 39th minute for a 2-0 edge.<\/p>\n
“I would say the team played a near perfect game, through the defense, midfield and attack,” Miami coach Javier Mascherano said.<\/p>\n
Miami is 19-2-3 this season in MLS play when it scores at least two goals, but Nashville made the Herons earn this one.<\/p>\n
It appeared, briefly anyway, that Nashville cut the lead in half in the opening minute of the second half, but Sam Surridge’s potential goal was whistled dead because one of his feet got tangled with Miami’s Maxi Falcon on the play and a foul was called.<\/p>\n
The Miami-Cincinnati winner will play either the top-seeded Philadelphia Union or the fifth-seeded New York City FC in the conference final. The MLS Cup final is scheduled for Dec. 6, and Cincinnati, Miami or Philadelphia would all host if it got to the title game because no team in the Western Conference finished with more points in the regular-season standings than any member of that trio.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"FORT LAUDERDALE, Fla. \u2014 Lionel Messi and Inter Miami CF are three wins away from their first Major…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":39585,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[17],"tags":[249,251,250],"class_list":["post-39584","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-fort-lauderdale","tag-fort-lauderdale","tag-fort-lauderdale-headlines","tag-fort-lauderdale-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/39584","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=39584"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/39584\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/39585"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=39584"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=39584"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=39584"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}