Tino Asprilla is hanging in the Tyneside night sky. The Colombian possessed a natural spring and an unusual hang time, but he has remained there for almost 28 years. In many an imagination in Newcastle, anyway. Newcastle against Barcelona conjures memories, though some of them were never forgotten.
Asprilla’s penalty against Louis van Gaal’s Barcelona can be obscured by what followed; by the two headers that completed his hat-trick, by the sight of Keith Gillespie tormenting Sergi and standing up crosses, by the sense of the spectacular and the surreal. It only has one rival for the title of St James’ Park’s greatest Champions League night: a 4-1 demolition of Paris Saint-Germain two years ago that has come to look like a still better result since then. No one else has beaten Luis Enrique’s PSG in European competitions by more than two goals. Such is the power of St James’ Park on such occasions. A quarter of a century earlier, Luis Enrique had been a scorer for Barcelona in that 3-2 defeat to Newcastle. Then he got to witness an altogether more ungainly header, an airborne Dan Burn helping condemn PSG to defeat.
