FORT LAUDERDALE: Lionel Messi and Inter Miami reached the MLS Cup final for the first time on Saturday after a 5-1 thrashing of New York City FC in the Eastern Conference playoffs.<\/p>\n
A Tadeo Allende hat-trick and goals from Mateo Silvetti and Telasco Segovia ensured Miami advanced to Major League Soccer’s championship game next Saturday at their home field in Fort Lauderdale.<\/p>\n
Miami will host the winner of the Western Conference final, which is being played between San Diego FC and Vancouver Whitecaps later on Saturday.<\/p>\n
Messi and his team-mates will head into that game bristling with confidence after another ruthless, high-scoring demolition job that followed on from their 4-0 drubbing of FC Cincinnati in the previous round.<\/p>\n
Allende — who scored twice in the victory over Cincinnati — was once again the focal point of the Miami attack.<\/p>\n
The 26-year-old Argentine forward opened the scoring in the 14th minute after cleverly springing the New York offside trap.<\/p>\n
A perfectly weighted ball from Sergio Busquets sent Allende racing in on goal, and the winger shrugged off Raul Gustavo’s challenge to lash home and make it 1-0.<\/p>\n
New York had barely had time to digest that early setback before it was 2-0.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"FORT LAUDERDALE: Lionel Messi and Inter Miami reached the MLS Cup final for the first time on Saturday…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":65095,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[17],"tags":[38598,249,251,250,10073,1660,38597],"class_list":["post-65094","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-fort-lauderdale","tag-eastern-conference-playoffs","tag-fort-lauderdale","tag-fort-lauderdale-headlines","tag-fort-lauderdale-news","tag-inter-miami","tag-lionel-messi","tag-mls-cup-final"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/65094","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=65094"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/65094\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/65095"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=65094"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=65094"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=65094"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}